🧛 Stack Shooter: Vampire Siege (Standalone)

A top-down, wave-survival shooter in the Vampire-Survivors mould — dash through swarms, chain upgrades, take down escalating bosses. This is the standalone, cross-platform rebuild of the game, decoupled from Reddit's Devvit platform, with its core simulation running in a compiled Rust/WebAssembly engine.

Originally built as a Reddit-native game for the Reddit x Kiro Hackathon 2025 (see stack-shooter-reddit for that version — it won an honorable mention). This repo is the ongoing rebuild: no Reddit dependency, playable anywhere on the open web, with an Android build in progress.

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🎮 Gameplay

• 4 difficulty modes — Easy, Normal, Hard, Nightmare
• 6 upgrade paths — Vitality, Firepower, Rapid Fire, Agility, Quick Dash, Piercing Shots
• Boss waves — multi-phase bosses with distinct abilities on top of the standard vampire waves
• Dash mechanic — energy-managed dash for crowd control and repositioning
• Procedural visuals — characters and effects are drawn procedurally (SVG-style), no external art assets to load
• Tutorial mode — interactive onboarding for new players
• Mobile-first controls — virtual joystick + tap-to-fire, alongside WASD/mouse on desktop

Controls

Platform	Move	Aim / Fire	Dash
Desktop	WASD / Arrows	Mouse to aim, click to shoot	Spacebar
Mobile	Virtual joystick	Tap to fire	Dash button

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🏗️ Architecture

The interesting part of this rebuild is the split between the game shell and the simulation:

┌─────────────────────── React (JS) ───────────────────────┐
│  Menus · HUD · Audio · Input · Wave scheduling            │
│  Upgrades · Tutorial · Canvas 2D drawing                   │
│                                                             │
│        ▲                                    │              │
│        │ read world (zero-copy)              │ step(dt, input) │
│        │                                      ▼              │
│  ┌───────────────── Rust (compiled to WASM) ─────────────┐ │
│  │  Player · Enemies · Boss AI · Collisions · Hitscan     │ │
│  │  Particles · Blood splatters · Floating text           │ │
│  └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

React owns everything the player sees and touches — menus, HUD, sound, input, wave timing, the tutorial state machine. The Rust engine (engine-rs/) is a small headless library that owns only the hot-loop math: player/enemy state, boss AI, collision and hitscan resolution, and particle systems. React calls into it ~60 times a second and reads the results back out of WASM memory with no copying.

Full write-up of why this split (and not a full Rust/macroquad port) is the right call: docs/RUST_PORT_EXPLAINED.md.

Project history and phase-by-phase evolution: CHANGELOG.md.

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🛠️ Tech Stack

• React 19 + Vite 6 — UI and build tooling
• Rust + wasm-bindgen + glam — compiled simulation engine (engine-rs/)
• Tailwind CSS 4 — styling
• Capacitor — native Android wrapper
• Vercel — web hosting + analytics
• GitHub Actions — automated WASM recompilation and Android APK builds

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🚀 Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Node.js 20+
• Rust + wasm-pack (only if you're changing the engine itself — prebuilt WASM output is committed to src/engine/pkg/)
• Android SDK + JDK 21 (only if building the Android app locally)

Installation

git clone https://github.com/Lycan-Xx/stack-shooter-standalone.git
cd stack-shooter-standalone
npm install

Run the web app

npm run dev       # local dev server
npm run build      # production build to dist/
npm run preview    # preview the production build

Rebuild the Rust engine

The compiled WASM output is committed to the repo, so you don't need Rust installed just to run the game. If you change engine-rs/src/lib.rs:

cd engine-rs
wasm-pack build --target web --release
cp -r pkg/. ../src/engine/pkg/

Pushing changes under engine-rs/ to main also triggers a GitHub Action that does this automatically and commits the result.

Build the Android app

npm run build:android   # vite build + capacitor sync
cd android
./gradlew assembleDebug

Pushing to main also triggers a GitHub Action that produces a debug APK as a build artifact.

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📁 Project Structure

stack-shooter-standalone/
├── engine-rs/              # Rust simulation engine (compiled to WASM)
│   └── src/lib.rs
├── src/
│   ├── engine/
│   │   ├── core/            # useGameLoop.js — drives the WASM engine each frame
│   │   ├── logic/            # difficulty, tutorial, upgrade rules (JS)
│   │   ├── systems/          # procedural rendering, sound
│   │   └── pkg/              # compiled WASM output + JS bindings
│   ├── components/          # React UI: StartScreen, HUD, GameOver, UpgradeScreen, etc.
│   └── shared/               # shared types
├── android/                  # Capacitor Android project
└── docs/
    ├── RUST_PORT_EXPLAINED.md
    └── development/

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🗺️ Roadmap

• Standalone web build, fully playable, no external dependencies
• Rust/WASM simulation engine (player, enemies, bosses, collisions, particles)
• Android build via Capacitor + GitHub Actions
• Signed release build for Google Play
• iOS build (requires macOS/Xcode toolchain)
• ECS-based engine architecture, wgpu rendering, parallel physics with Rayon (longer-term performance target)

See CHANGELOG.md for the full phase-by-phase history.

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📝 License

All Rights Reserved — see LICENSE

🔗 Links

• This repo: https://github.com/Lycan-Xx/stack-shooter-standalone
• Original Reddit/Devvit version: https://github.com/Lycan-Xx/stack-shooter-reddit
• GitHub: @Lycan-Xx