A retro run-and-gun platformer — Mario-style running and jumping meets Contra-style 8-way blasting, across side-scrolling zones with grunts, drones, turrets that shoot back, and end-of-zone bosses.
- 🏃 Tight platforming — run, accelerate, and a variable-height jump with coyote-time and input-buffering, so it feels good.
- 🔫 8-way run-and-gun — auto-fire and aim up / diagonally / down (in the air) Contra-style; grab the spread gun pickup for triple shots.
- 👾 Enemies that fight back — patrolling grunts, weaving drones, and wall turrets that lead their shots.
- 👹 Bosses — hovering mechs with a health bar and escalating spread attacks guard the end of a zone.
- 🗺️ 3 zones — Jungle Drop, Steel Ascent and Sky Fortress, each a hand-authored ASCII tilemap.
- ❤️ Lives & checkpoints — pits cost a sliver of health and hop you back to safe footing; run out and you respawn from the last checkpoint.
- 🏆 Online leaderboard — enter your 3-letter initials and land on the shared board.
- 🔊 8-bit sound & chiptune music — synthesized, no audio files. Press M to mute.
| Action | Input |
|---|---|
| Move | ← → or A / D |
| Jump | Space / Z (hold for a higher jump) |
| Shoot | X (hold to auto-fire) |
| Aim | Hold ↑, or ↓ in the air, while shooting |
| Pause · Mute | P / Esc · M |
Blastix is built on Retroix, a tiny dependency-free retro game engine loaded from a CDN (no build step). It's the first game to use Retroix's platformer stack:
Retroix.physics— gravity, velocity integration and axis-separated AABB collision resolution (the jump feel, wall/floor collisions,onGroundflags).Retroix.grid— each level is an ASCII tilemap parsed into a tile grid that feeds collision rects straight into the physics.Retroix.camera— the side-scroll follow, clamped to the level bounds.
…plus Retroix's canvas, loop, input, audio + music, screen-shake/flash, screens, retro initials entry and the leaderboard. All art is drawn procedurally.
| File | Responsibility |
|---|---|
js/game.js |
The game: movement, shooting, enemies, bosses, camera, render. |
js/levels.js |
Pure-data ASCII tilemaps (edit a string = edit the level). |
js/config.js |
Supabase URL/key and game id, passed to Retroix.leaderboard. |
| Retroix (CDN) | Physics, grid, camera, canvas, loop, input, audio, screens. |
Levels are just rows of characters — # ground, = platform, ^ spikes,
o coin, E grunt, V drone, T turret, B boss, W spread pickup,
C checkpoint, P start, G goal. Drop a new object into
js/levels.js and it plays.
Out of the box the leaderboard uses your browser's localStorage. To share
scores across devices — and with the other games — point it at a free
Supabase project: run docs/supabase.sql in the SQL
editor, then paste your Project URL and public anon key into
js/config.js. The anon key is public by design; the database
is protected by the row-level-security policies in the SQL file.
It's a static site — no build step:
git clone https://github.com/DanMat/Blastix.git
cd Blastix
python3 -m http.server 8000 # then visit http://localhost:8000Built from scratch in vanilla JavaScript on the Retroix engine — a Mario/Contra tribute a decade in the making.
MIT © DanMat