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Death Rider
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About the game
It is a cold night in the cemetery, and Death is out collecting. In this game he travels as a flying skull with a trail of blue sparks, gliding over a field of crooked trees and old graves while the souls of the departed rise from the ground, shining and a little silly, like cartoon ghosts.
You have one button. Hold it and the skull climbs and opens its jaw to fire; let go and it sinks. Gather as many souls as you can, shoot the bats that flutter across the sky, and do not let the skull hit the crosses that come sliding into your path, because one bump ends the run. The bats' souls count too, so a shot bat is points and not just a danger removed.
The score is shown as SOULS in the top left corner, and the best run is kept on the right, remembered in this browser. It is a quick, arcade game, meant for one more try. The look is chunky pixel art in a dark, purple and teal palette, and the spooky parts are the cartoon kind.
Csaba Csecskedi made it for js13kGames 2022, a contest where the entire game has to fit in 13 kilobytes. The original gave paying members of an online payment service an extra golden skull at the start; this version leaves that service out, so everyone starts the same way.
Playing it here
Click Play, then press Space or the mouse button (or tap) to begin. The skull is steered with the same one button all the time, so a mouse, a finger or the space bar all work. The sound plays right away, so check your volume.
Controls
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| Hold Space, left mouse button or a touch | rise and fire |
| Release | sink |
A few things worth knowing
Short taps keep you steady. Holding down makes the skull shoot upward quickly. Quick presses let you hover at one height and keep your fire on a row of bats.
Look for the souls near the ground. The souls rise from the graves, so you have to dip down to get them, and the ground has crosses in the way.
Fire and climb come together. The same button does both, so plan your height before you press: you cannot aim without moving.
Credits and licence
Death Rider was created by Csaba Csecskedi (tricsi). The game is released under the MIT licence. The licence text, the source code of this exact version and the one-line patch that removes the payment-service tag are linked from this page, and the project is on GitHub.