A vertically scrolling run-and-gun in the browser: eight stages behind enemy
lines, a rifle that fires in eight directions, and grenades that only ever fly
forward. Everything is in a single index.html — no libraries, no build step.
This is an original game written for this project, not a port. The soldier, the stages and the artwork are my own; no code, sprite or character from any published game is used. What it takes from the 1985 coin-op school of the genre is the shape of the thing: the battlefield scrolls at you from the top, cover can be blown apart, prisoners are worth rescuing, and every stage ends at a fortress gate that pours out soldiers behind a fleeing officer.
Arrow keys or WASD move. SPACE fires, G throws a grenade, P pauses,
M toggles sound, L cycles the language and N changes your name.
Auto aim, always. Steering and aiming at once is the hard part of a one-stick shooter, and four arrow keys are no better at it than a thumb, so the rifle always tracks the nearest enemy: run where you like, hold fire, and the barrel swings round on its own. A crosshair marks the locked target, a soldier ducked in a trench is not one until he stands up, and grenades follow the barrel rather than flying straight ahead. There is no setting for this — having the same game aim differently depending on what you opened it on was only confusing.
Pushing forward speeds up the advance, so you set your own pace between careful and reckless.
Touch — no on-screen buttons. The left half of the screen is the stick: drag to walk and aim. The right half is the trigger: hold to fire, swipe up to throw a grenade.
The advance never reverses, so an enemy who falls behind the bottom of the screen is out of the battle and is dropped. The gate finale waits only for what is on screen.
The rifle has unlimited ammunition; grenades do not, and you start each life with six. A grenade flies a fixed distance ahead of you and detonates there — or against the first sandbag wall or hut it meets, which is how you open a path through cover. Rocks and trees cannot be destroyed.
Enemy soldiers charge and shoot, riflemen pop up from trenches, and officers keep their distance and lob grenades back at you. Prisoners are dragged across the battlefield by a guard: shoot the guard and the prisoner is worth 1000 points, but a stray bullet kills them.
At the end of a stage the scrolling stops at the gate. Clear the wave and the stage is yours. Shooting the officer before he flees is worth 3000.
Three lives, an extra one at 10 000 points and then every 50 000. Two-player games alternate, life by life, the way the coin-op did it.
Scores are shared online through Firebase, with a top-ten table on the title and game-over screens. With no connection the game keeps working and falls back to scores stored in the browser. Two-player games are friendlies and are not submitted.
English, Slovenian, German, Italian and French, detected from the device and
switchable with L or the on-screen button.
The game is a PWA: a browser will offer to add it to the home screen (on iOS, Share → Add to Home Screen), and it then opens standalone. A service worker caches the page, so after the first visit it runs with no connection at all — the score board naturally needs the network and falls back to local scores.
MIT