Portugues
Killing Orcs with a Sword
Saved games stay in this browser only.
About the game
The goal is written on the title screen: defeat the orc lord. You carry a magic sword, and the orc lord is somewhere at the far end of a map full of goblin-like fighters in ruined halls. Everything is drawn in text characters in a small window, so you read the fight from letters and colours, and moving the mouse over something tells you what it is.
The combat is what makes it. Besides plain attacks, you have a set of energy moves bound to single keys: a sword slash, a quick flurry, a whirl that hits everything around you, a shove that pushes an enemy back, a throw, and a heal that costs a lot of energy. Health and energy both start at 50 and the game is about spending the second to protect the first. Corridors, doorways and rubble decide who gets surrounded, so you pick a fight the way you pick a square on a chessboard. Runs are short, and when you lose, one more round is only a key press away.
Max Whitney made it in seven days for the 7DRL 2021 challenge, in Rust, with the bracket-lib terminal library, and it runs in the browser as WebAssembly. The game is free software under the GNU GPL version 2, and we host the exact source of this build.
Playing it here
Click Play and click once on the game so it hears the keyboard. At the title menu press N for a new game, or C to continue a saved one (the game saves in this browser), and O to close the opening message. Press the slash key at any moment for the full list of keys. Moves that need a direction wait for you to press an arrow or a movement key.
Controls
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| Arrow keys, H J K L, Y U B N or the number pad | move in eight directions, or attack by moving into an enemy |
| Z | sword slash (6 energy) |
| X | sword flurry (4 energy) |
| C | sword whirl (10 energy) |
| S | shove (2 energy) |
| A | throw off (6 energy) |
| D | heal (20 energy) |
| Space or . | wait a turn |
| Esc | cancel the move you were about to make |
| / | show the key list |
| Mouse | hover to read what a tile is |
A few things worth knowing
Energy is a second health bar. Spend it on the moves that fit the moment: the whirl when you are surrounded, the slash when one enemy is in line.
Use the walls. A doorway lets only one enemy reach you at a time.
Wait for energy when you can. Waiting a turn is cheap when nobody is near.
Save with care. The game stores one save in this browser; clearing site data deletes it.
Credits and licence
Killing orcs with a sword was made by Max Whitney and is released under the GNU General Public License, version 2. The only outside file is the title picture, which is in the author's repository; the font is the one built into the bracket-lib library (MIT, by Herbert Wolverson) and the game has no sound. We did not change the game: only the web page around it is ours. As the licence asks, the complete source of this build (the game's code, the page, the build script and the licence texts of the libraries) is hosted next to the game and linked from this page.