Emoji Survivors

About the game

You are a single emoji in a big field, and monsters, also emoji, come at you from every side. You only move; your weapons fire by themselves. Kill monsters to drop gems, collect the gems to level up, and each level offers a choice of new weapons or passive upgrades. The aim is to survive fifteen minutes and then defeat the Reaper.

Between runs you spend the coins you earned in a power-up shop, for lasting upgrades up to level five. You can pick a hero, each with a different style: a knife thrower, a wizard with a wide projectile, a nimble cat, a rapid-fire bot and more to unlock, and there are several stages, locked at first.

The look is made from emoji glyphs recoloured and outlined by the game. Your progress, coins and unlocks are saved in the browser.

Playing it here

Click Play and the game opens on its title screen. Press Play there to start. The sound can be turned off with the speaker icon in the corner, and the game also has a fullscreen button.

Controls

Arrows or WASD to move. Your weapons fire on their own. On a touch screen, drag the on-screen stick.

A few things worth knowing

Keep moving. Standing still lets the swarm surround you; circle the field.

Take the gems. Levelling up early gives you a stronger set of weapons for the long run.

FAQ

Where do the emoji come from? From the Twemoji font (twemoji.ttf), under CC BY 4.0; see Credits.

Credits and licence

Emoji Survivors is one of the games in LittleJS Arcade by Frank Force, and it runs on his LittleJS engine. Both are released under the MIT licence; the licence text is linked from this page. The collection's repository includes notes for AI coding assistants, so the code was written at least in part with AI help. The graphics are drawn by the code and the sounds are synthesised, so the game loads no image or audio files. The emoji artwork is from Twemoji, copyright Twitter, Inc and other contributors, used under CC BY 4.0 and modified by the game (recoloured and outlined). The source code is on GitHub.