When I first wrote Square Shooter in 2009, use of the canvas element was uncommon enough to earn me entrance into multiple game directories. Fast forward four years, everybody uses HTML5 and my little shooter was long in the tooth. The physics were broken (I had fixed them in the Python edition), it had no sound, and didn’t really adapt to different resolutions as it was supposed to. Worse, many of my friends now had touchscreen devices, and Square Shooter was unplayable on them.

A combination of burnout and indecision caused me to postpone this rewrite for a long time, and then it took quite a bit of experimentation to get things right. But it’s here now! The new Square Shooter runs more smoothly (thanks to the requestAnimationFrame shim from Three.js), looks good on any screen (except it strongly prefers portrait mode) and also runs on modern phones and tablets (though you need a fast CPU). It also features awesome sound effects courtesy of Open Game Art. I can never give enough thanks to the awesome people who make art for the rest of us to use.

So I give you the Enhanced Edition in all its glory. Play it. Fork it. And see if you can reproduce that one weird bug (you’ll know it if you see it), because I can’t figure it out.

Oh, and stay tuned because I plan to add graphics as well. Cheers.

Comments

This game is my new work-safe addiction! I like retro styling and how it’s called “Square Shooter” when you play a circular shooter shooting circles at circles. And while the JS isn’t iOS-friendly, it plays well enough on Android. Kudos!

— Zesago


Finally, someone who appreciates the joke. To be honest, back in the dawns of time the game was supposed to feature squares, and the name stuck.

It doesn’t run (well) on iOS, then? Oh well. Thank you.

Felix