Save the Castle

About the game

Save the Castle is a small arcade game made for the 32blit, the open-source handheld console from Pimoroni, by M. Gerloff (lummi01 on GitHub), who has written a whole shelf of games for it. It is a homebrew game: it was written by an independent developer for the device and released under the MIT licence, and here it runs in your browser with no changes to the game.

You stand on the battlements of a grey stone castle, seen from the side, under a blue sky. Raiders come running in from the left and right edges of the screen, reach the foot of the wall and start to climb the dark ladders, one by one. If one of them makes it to the top, it walks along the wall straight at you, and touching you costs one of your three lives. Your only weapon is a stone.

Every wave brings a few more attackers than the last one. A wave ends when the last raider is gone, and then the stones you did not use are counted up and added to your score, so wasting them is a bad habit. When the three lives are gone the game is over, and a press of the fire button starts again from the first wave.

Playing it here

Click Play and the title screen appears; press Z to start the first wave. The screen is the console's own 320×240 one, scaled up in whole steps so the pixels stay sharp. The game has no sound and does not save anything, so you can leave whenever you like and nothing is stored.

If you play on a phone or tablet, a direction pad and the A, B and menu buttons appear under the screen. On a computer, use the keyboard.

Controls

Tips

Walk to the pile, then back. You carry one stone at a time, and the piles are at the two ends of the wall, so a stone always costs you a short walk. Pick one up while the raiders are still on the ground.

Drop it in front of a ladder. A stone falls straight down and knocks off anyone it meets on the way, so wait until a raider is climbing right below you, or until several are lined up. Every extra raider the same stone hits is worth more than the one before.

Do not meet them on the wall. Once a raider is on top of the wall you are in trouble: it comes straight at you, so keep an eye on the ladders and deal with them before the last step.

FAQ

Is this a copy of an older game? It is in the family of the old "defend the tower" arcade games, but the castle, the characters and the rules are the author's own, and the game is a different, much smaller one.

Does it save my score? No. The score counts up on the screen and starts again at zero after a game over.

What is a 32blit? A small open-source handheld with a 320×240 screen, a D-pad and four buttons that anyone can write games for. The games run on the device or, as here, on a computer.