Blastgeist

You play a flame spirit with unlimited bombs and rockets, and you aim them at your own feet. Rocket-jumping and conc-jumping — the traversal tricks players invented in Quake and Team Fortress Classic — are the whole movement system here rather than a bonus layered on top of running and jumping. Ammo is free, so the difficulty is execution: reading a room, deciding where to blast and when. Lava kills on contact and puts you back at the last checkpoint brazier.

I built it because that trick was always the most interesting thing in the shooters that had it, and it was never the point of any of them. I wanted one where it was the point.

Everything on screen is drawn procedurally at runtime — the character, the terrain, the flame, the parallax layers — from hashes, time and a palette, with no sprite sheets or stored art anywhere in the repo. It began as a single 1,500-line HTML file and has since been split into ES modules with a level editor shipped next to the game. It is a prototype: the movement feel is dialled in and documented constant by constant, but there is no game around it yet — no enemies, no progression, a handful of test levels.