The brilliant arcade game Defender now playable inside the favicon of your browser! The idea was to push the concept of generated favicons far and beyond and pack a thrilling retro shooter in 16×16 pixels.
DEFENDER of the what ?
DEFENDER of the favicon is a JavaScript remake of Eugene Jarvis' brilliant arcade game Defender written by Mathieu 'p01' Henri and inspired by Scott Schiller's experiment with generated favicons VU meter.
The idea was to push the concept of generated favicons further and pack a thrilling retro shooter in 16×16 pixels using JavaScript, canvas and data: URIs.
Gameplay & Controls
The menace come from above! Protect the humanoid population from the waves of aliens coming to abduct them. Thankfully the shield of your Defender can take a few hit.
Controls
- N to shoot or start a game
- WASD or the arrow keys to move your Defender over the humanoid city
Behind the scene
DEFENDER of the favicon was done in 3 nights, from start to finish, in the summer 2008. Each frame of the game is generated on the fly in JavaScript into a 16×16 canvas element, then converted to a 32bits PNG image and used in place of the favicon.
The core of the game act as a state machine. Notice a few details such as the pause when this tab is not focused, and the resuming and game over transitions.
The game logic isn't really complex but remains true to the original Defender and provides enough action for 16×16 pixels.
The original game mechanics would make Defender of the favicon insanely difficult. Therefore a few adjustments were done : none of the enemies fire at you, your Defender got upgraded with a shield, and finally the Landers do not mutate into unstoppable war machines after abducting a humanoid but wander in your general direction.
Feedback
The feedback to Defender of the favicon has been overwhelming. It was all over the place: Boing Boing, Laughing Squid, Digg, Reddit, Kotaku, Youtube, Ajaxian, IDEAxIDEA, ... And it is the highest rated original JavaScript production on Pouet.
Last words before blasting off
I tried to stay away from my usual size optimizations experiments, but I guess this little game still falls in that category. One day I will make something BIG. One day.
Other recent experiments
There are many experiments and projects like DEFENDER OF THE FAVICON to discover other here.
FRONTFEST MOSCOW It was an honour to be invited to Fronfest Moscow 2017 with the little family to give my first workshop; implementing a Twin-stick shooter using ES6 and Canvas, and to continue my CODE🎙ART series of talks + live coding aiming to inspire new web developer artists. on November 18th, 2017
VOLTRA VOLTRA: Grinding the Universe, a gritty JavaScript demo, winner of the 1024 bytes demo competition at the Assembly 2017. on August 6th, 2017
BREATHING EARTH Another take on Nadieh Bremer mesmerizing Breathing Earth visualisation, running at 60fps on a 2D Canvas without libraries or frameworks. on June 26th, 2017
MINAMI DISTRICT DEMOJS 2013's winner 1k intro. With MINAMI DISTRICT I wanted to do something fresh. Something never seen in normal demos before: A city with a twister skyscraper. on June 29th, 2013
MARS LANDSCAPE Remember the amazing MARS 4Kb intro by Tim Clarke in 1993 ? Here comes a remake in 256b using JavaScript and Canvas on October 16th, 2008
MANDELBROT TRACER Possibly the smallest Mandelbrot tracer ever in JavaScript: 101 bytes on September 21st, 2008
TUNNEX Ascii art tunnel + Scroll text: The first multi-effect 256b production in JavaScript on June 28th, 2008
MAGIC A cute little intro for the Magic BBS made in 3.5kb for MSDOS on April 11th, 1997
Let's talk
Don't be shy; get in touch by mail, twitter, github, linkedin or pouet if you have any questions, feedback, speaking, workshop or performance opportunity.