Square Shooter is an abstract shooter (duh!) very loosely based on the classic arcade game Asteroids. It's not complete, but it is quite addictive. You've been warned!
Play
Instructions
Click the hollow bubbles to shoot them. Hold down the mouse button BRIEFLY (and preferably not far from your ship) to accelerate towards the cursor. You may want to catch the little squares – they're useful power-ups. That's about all!
If you don't see any text on the game screen, just click to start playing. There's a pause button in the upper left and a quit button in the lower right. Quitting only works while the game is paused, to prevent accidents.
Compatibility
Square Shooter is fully compatible with Firefox 3.5, Safari (version unknown) and other Webkit-based browsers such as Arora.
Partial compatibility exists with Firefox 2.0.x/3.0.x and Konqueror 4.
The game will not work on Opera, IE or the iPhone. See below for technical details.
Status
As of 2010-04-26, the TODO list is as follows:
- Add lives.
- Change the 'gate' powerup to an extra life.
- Optimize the code.
Download
What, you don't know how to get at the Javascript? Boo! Here it is. As with most of my software, you can have it under the MIT License. Enjoy!
Technical issues
Square Shooter relies on the new <canvas> tag in HTML5. Unfortunately, browser support is still spotty, and this is by no means the only problem. IE doesn't even implement the ECMAScript standard, but a different language that is usually compatible. Not in this case. And then I'm not sure the Excanvas emulation layer would be fast enough.
Now, Opera does implement the ECMAScript standard, but its canvas implementation is incomplete and possibly buggy and I'm not willing to work around specific browser bugs at this stage.
On the iPhone, at least, the game starts up normally, but since the onmousedown/onmouseup events don't fire, there is no way to actually play the game. If there's a simple workaround, let me know.
