Portugues
Complicit
Saved games stay in this browser only.
About the game
Waves of invaders drift down the screen in tight, shimmering formations, and your job is to clear them. Complicit is a vertical shooter made for a narrow upright screen, and it is happiest on a phone, but it also works with the keyboard on a computer.
Its twist is the glitch. Your ship does not fly freely: it slides along a curved line at the bottom of the screen, and you reshape that curve as you play. When you are killed the game "crashes" with a few lines of fake error text, restores the last stable state, and a ghost replays your failed attempt next to you, firing at the invaders. Each death leaves another ghost, so the screen fills with your own past selves. There are three zones to pick from the menu. The alpha zone teaches the controls and the glitch, the beta zone sends more bullets and more enemies, and the omega zone is short, mean and made for people who want revenge. Thirteen kinds of enemy show up between them, with their own formations and patterns, and every zone has a par time and an expert time to beat; your last and best runs are shown on the menu card and kept in this browser.
It looks like a screen full of glowing neon: yellow, orange and purple shapes on black, with a big "incoming" warning that spins across the field when a wave arrives. Everything is drawn with browser graphics, and there is no music or audio file to load.
Andrew Higson-Smith (ElementalSystems) made it for js13kGames 2016, a contest where the whole game has to fit in 13 kilobytes.
Playing it here
Click Play and pick a zone from the menu, then press "Play now". The game works best in a tall window, and it says so when the screen is too wide. Click inside the game if the keys do not respond.
Controls
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| Left and right arrow keys, or A and D | slide the ship along its curve |
| Up and down arrow keys, or W and S | make the curve steeper or flatter |
| Space or Enter | fire without moving |
| Mouse or touch, press and drag | move and fire |
A few things worth knowing
Start in the first zone. It teaches the controls and the glitch, and the other two zones assume you know them.
Time counts. Each zone has a par time and an expert time, so clearing the screen quickly matters as much as staying alive.
Deaths are not wasted. The ghost of your last attempt fights for you, so a failed run is also a rehearsal. The ship only fires while you press something, so keep a key down.
Credits and licence
Complicit was created by Andrew Higson-Smith (ElementalSystems) and is dedicated to the public domain under the Unlicense. The licence text is linked from this page, and the project is on GitHub.