Retro flavored games inspired by games I built/played as a youth.

XenoTech

Nothing Is Coming to Help

A wave-based arcade shooter in the Galaga line, and a hundred waves is one night: ten acts of ten, each its own painted place, each ending on a boss. You start in a ruined street at four in the morning and finish in the same street at dawn. It is one enemy the whole way, and it is learning — the first thirty waves are grown things that have never seen a machine, then the Vivisector takes a ship apart to find out what we are, and everything after is bone and chrome built out of what it found. Lose a life and your hull stays on the field while a harvester comes for it; kill that harvester inside six seconds and the wreck docks back on your shoulder as a wingman.

• Inspired by Galaga
• Ten acts, ten places, one night
• Ten bosses, drawn coming apart
• Salvage your own wreck for a wingman
• Combo multiplier to ×8
• Global leaderboard

Rabbit Crossing

A Bunny Grows Up

A lane-crossing arcade game about growing up one crossing at a time. A kit in the woods dodging foxes, a kid on a recess blacktop where the lava is painted on, a first job between the forklifts — then out into the world: a divided highway, a beer garden on the Rhine, a lantern-lit festival night, Paris, the savanna, Amsterdam, and last of all the Tōkaidō, where the bunny pulls on a ninja’s hood and no ground on the board is safe. Eleven levels; every one lays the board out differently, and the bunny dresses for where it is.

• Inspired by Frogger
• Eleven levels, eleven boards
• Replay-validated leaderboard
• Runs from a single HTML file

Redacted Descent

You start on the roof, dropped off a helicopter, and the only way out is the street. In between are three buildings of a foundation that has spent real money making sure nobody reads its filing cabinets. The elevators are slow and have to be called, the escalators only ever run downwards, and an empty shaft is not a corridor — it is a hole, and you will fall through it. Fifty-four documents are in there, and a file only counts once you carry it out to the street: die on the way down and you keep the satchel, but a run that never gets out banks nothing.

• Inspired by Elevator Action
• Three buildings, fifty-four documents
• A case board built from what you got
• Real FOIA exemption codes on the sheets
• Replay-validated leaderboard

Silicon Aftermath

Still Switched On

A persistent-world MMO played in a browser. Earth, forty years after the machine networks took control — you are a scavenger stripping downed machines for compute. Combat resolves on a timing gauge rather than menu selection or dice: strike a machine’s vent window and it hurts, strike the plating and it does not. Six maps above and below ground, every step paid for out of an energy pool that refills in real time, and scarce plots of land you can claim, build up and respawn onto.

• Inspired by Operation Overkill (1990)
• Timing-gauge combat
• Six maps, two of them underground
• Claimable player bases
• Live boss events

Project Rescue

A Figit Toy featuring Black Airplane

A Defender in a software agency’s clothes. You fly a prop fighter across a wrapping strip of coastline while scope-creep drones settle onto abandoned projects and haul them up towards the ceiling. Let one get there and the project is destroyed and comes back as tech debt — fast, homing, and permanent for the rest of the run. So you shoot the drones, catch what falls, and fly it home to the hangar; a heavy crate slows you down, and anything still in your arms dies with you. Every mechanic is named after something the agency actually does, which is the whole joke.

• Inspired by Defender
• Four acts: Assess to Transition
• Deterministic fixed-point sim
• Still being built

Chrome Carnage

Vehicular combat racing in 3D. Machine guns and rocket launchers bolted to cars that handle like cars, with armour, engine and weapon tiers to bolt on between races, and bots that will wreck you rather than politely follow the racing line.

• Three upgrade tracks
• Waypoint-driven bot AI
• Downloadable build, not a browser game