Norman the Necromancer

About the game

Norman was not a popular necromancer. The villagers hunt him, and they keep coming, marching in from the right side of the screen: villagers, bandits, archers, armoured knights, monks, pipers with their rats and worse. Norman stands his ground on the left, at the edge of a graveyard, and fights back with magic: aim with the mouse and every click hurls a spell in a high arc across the field.

Fallen villagers sometimes leave their corpses behind, and that is where Norman's real power lies. Press Space and every corpse on the field rises as a skeleton that marches against its former neighbours. The resurrection then needs time to recharge, and spells are limited too, so the game is about timing: thin out the crowd, then raise an army at the right moment.

Each kill gives Norman souls. Between levels a shop opens where souls buy healing, extra health, more spell charges and, above all, rituals: one-off upgrades that change how the game works, such as spells that bounce, that ignore gravity, that fire two at a time, that split into a shower when they land or that make enemies bleed, or double damage at the price of a wobbly aim. Each run offers a different selection, and the levels lead up to a final confrontation with the king.

Dan Prince made the game for js13kGames 2022, whose theme was "Death". The code, sprites, font and music all fit in a zip of 13 kilobytes.

Playing it here

This is the version submitted to the competition, unchanged. Click Play; the short introduction tells Norman's story, and a click starts the game and the music. Nothing is saved between visits: every run starts fresh.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Corpses are ammunition. Not every villager leaves one, so do not waste the resurrection on a single body if a bigger fight is coming.

Watch the cooldown. The Resurrect prompt at the bottom of the screen shows how long until you can raise the dead again.

Rituals stack. The real fun is in the combinations. A ritual that looks weak on its own can turn into something powerful together with another one.

Do not neglect health. Buying extra health early makes the later, crowded levels much more forgiving.

Credits and licence

Norman the Necromancer was created by Dan Prince, who wrote the code, drew the pixel art and composed the music. He released it into the public domain with the Unlicense, published in his repository on GitHub, where he also links to a retrospective on making the game. The licence text is linked from this page.