Dodge the Creeps · FredyGames

About the game

Dodge the Creeps is as small as an arcade game gets. A little character stands in a green-blue room. Every half second a new creep flies, swims or walks in from a random point on the edge of the screen and crosses it in a straight line, at a speed that changes from one creep to the next. Your score is the number of seconds you stay alive, and one touch from a creep ends the round.

There are no power-ups, no levels and no tricks: the room never changes and the creeps never aim at you. The challenge is reading a crowd of crossing lines and finding the gap before it closes, and the score on the top of the screen is all the motivation you need for one more try. It is a good way to spend two minutes, and a good way to spend an hour trying to beat your own record.

The game is also something of a landmark. It is the finished version of the project from "Your first 2D game", the step-by-step tutorial in the documentation of the Godot engine, and it ships with the engine's demo projects. If you have ever wondered what a game made with Godot looks like once it is running in a browser, this is the smallest complete example, and it is the first Godot game on this site.

Playing it here

Click Play and wait for the page to load (the engine is about 9 MB, downloaded only when you press the button). Then click Start, or press Space or Enter. "Get Ready" stays on screen for two seconds and the creeps begin. The game keeps the music going while you play and plays a sound when you lose. Nothing is saved: every round starts from zero.

This is the demo as its authors published it, exported for the web with the Godot engine in its single-threaded mode, and it makes no requests outside this site. The game needs a keyboard; there are no touch controls.

Controls

Input	Action
W, A, S, D or the arrow keys	move in eight directions
Space or Enter	start a round (the same as clicking Start)
Gamepad (D-pad or left stick)	move, if your browser exposes a gamepad

Tips

Stay out of the corners. The edge of the screen is where creeps arrive, and a corner leaves you only one way out.

Move in small steps. Your character is fast and stops at once, so short taps are safer than long runs.

Read the angle, not the creep. Creeps never change direction, so the line each one is on at the moment it appears is where it will stay. Pick the empty gap behind it, not in front of it.

Use the middle. Away from the edges you have room to go either way.

FAQ

Is it only one level? Yes. The room and the creeps never change; only your score does.

Does the game get harder? Not by itself. Creeps arrive at a steady rhythm, so the screen simply fills up the longer you survive.

Is it free to share? Yes. The project is free software under the MIT licence, and the licences of the art, music and font are listed below.

Credits and licence

Dodge the Creeps was made by Chris Bradfield (KidsCanCode) for the Godot Engine documentation and is part of the official godot-demo-projects repository. The project is under the MIT licence, and the game runs on Godot Engine 4.7.2, also under the MIT licence.

Music: "House In a Forest Loop" by HorrorPen, Copyright 2012, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Source: OpenGameArt. Used unchanged.
Images: "Abstract Platformer" by Kenney, 2016, CC0 1.0 Universal.

The licence texts, including the notices of the libraries inside the Godot engine, and the source of this build are linked from this page.