Radius Raid

About the game

Radius Raid drops a small white ship into a dark arena much larger than the screen and sends wave after wave of enemies towards it. You steer with the keyboard and shoot with the mouse, so you can run in one direction while firing in another, the classic twin-stick arrangement played with a keyboard and a mouse.

The enemies start out slow and simple, a few rings drifting in your direction, and get faster, tougher and stranger as the levels go on: some split in two, some circle you, some are nearly invisible, some spawn others, thirteen types in all. Destroyed enemies sometimes leave power-ups behind: a health pack, slowed enemies, faster shots, triple shots and shots that pierce through several targets. The progress bar at the top fills as you clear the current level, and the radar in the corner shows what is coming from off screen.

Jack Rugile made the game for the js13kGames competition of 2013, where the whole entry, code, graphics and sound, had to fit in a zip file of 13 kilobytes. The sound effects are generated on the fly by jsfxr, and the parallax star field, the glow effects and the pixel font are all drawn by code.

Playing it here

This is the original competition version, unchanged. Click Play and choose Play on the title screen; the controls are shown on screen when a game begins. The game was designed for an 800 by 600 window, and here it is scaled to fit the frame. Your best score and other statistics are kept in this browser, on the Stats screen. The credits screen has a JS13KGAMES button that replaces the game with the competition's website; it only does that if you click it.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Turn on autofire. With F on, the ship fires constantly and you only need to aim, which saves your finger and leaves your attention for dodging.

Keep moving. Enemies converge on where you are, so circling the arena is safer than holding a position, and the arena is big enough to run.

Watch the radar. The minimap in the lower left corner shows enemies outside the screen. Use it before you run into a group you cannot see.

Power-ups do not last. Most of them run out after a few seconds, so grab them when a big group is near, not when the screen is empty.

Credits and licence

Radius Raid was created by Jack Rugile, who wrote the code and drew everything in it. Its sound effects are generated by jsfxr, a JavaScript port of as3sfxr by Markus Neubrand, under the Apache License 2.0. The game is released under the MIT licence, published in Jack Rugile's repository on GitHub. The licence texts are linked from this page.