Square Shooter is an abstract shooter (duh!) very loosely based on the classic arcade game Asteroids. It's by no means complete, but it is already quite addictive. You've been warned!
Play
Instructions
Click the hollow bubbles to shoot them. Hold down mouse button BRIEFLY (and preferably not far from your ship) to accelerate towards cursor. You may want to catch the little squares -- they're useful power-ups. That's about all!
Compatibility
Square Shooter is fully compatible with Firefox 3.5, Safari (recent versions) and Webkit-based browsers such as Arora.
Partial compatibility exists with Firefox 2.0.x/3.0.x and Konqueror 4. If you have one of those, you won'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.
The game will not work on Opera, IE or the iPhone. See below for technical details.
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!
Status
As of 2009-07-11, Square Shooter still needs:
- high score saving (I seem to be using localStorage wrong);
- easy mode (though the game feels balanced to me).
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.
