Starfall Siege

A top-down arcade shooter where every enemy you drop without getting hit builds toward a screen-clearing bomb.

Date: 2026-07-29 Genre: Arcade shooter Status: Playable build

Concept

Your ship sits at the bottom of a starfield, cannon firing on its own, while rows of raiders drift down in sine-wave formation. The only real decision is where to stand. It's the old Galaga fantasy of holding the line against a wave that never quite stops growing, but the bomb meter turns "stay alive" into an active bet instead of a passive dodge.

How to play

Survive as many waves as you can. Enemies die in one hit (three for the orange tanks that show up from wave 3 on), and your gun fires automatically, so movement is the whole game. Move with the arrow keys or WASD, or just drag your mouse or finger anywhere on the field; the ship eases toward wherever you point it. Hit Space or tap the glowing BOMB button once the meter fills to wipe every enemy on screen. Three hits and it's over; press R or tap to try again.

Core mechanics

• Auto-fire cannon that upgrades from a single shot to a spread of three as you collect green weapon drops
• A combo counter that climbs every kill and resets to zero the moment you take a hit, directly scaling your score multiplier
• A bomb meter fed by kills (tanks fill it faster), full at 20 and yours to spend the instant it lights up
• Diving enemy fire that tracks your position when it spawns, so drifting matters even against enemies that never reach you
• A brief invulnerability window after getting hit (or from a purple shield drop), long enough to reposition without punishing every mistake twice

Progression & scoring

Waves get denser as you go: more rows, more columns, tighter enemy fire timers. Tanks start mixing in from wave 3, eating three hits apiece and dropping bomb charge faster when they finally go down. Score per kill is 10 times your current combo multiplier, so a clean run where you never eat a shot is worth far more than the raw kill count suggests. Bombing a packed wave is a guaranteed multiplier-preserving points spike, which is exactly why saving it for the worst moment usually beats using it the second it's ready.

Look & feel

Everything is drawn on canvas: a slow parallax starfield behind angular ship silhouettes rendered in cool blues for you and hot pink-orange for the enemy fleet, with small pixel-burst particles on every kill. All sound comes from the WebAudio API: the shot's descending square-wave chirp, the low sawtooth boom of an explosion, the bomb's sub-bass rumble. Nothing to load, nothing to wait on before you're playing.

What makes it fun

• The bomb is a resource you choose when to cash in, not a panic button. Holding it through a scary wave to detonate at the worst possible moment for the enemy is the whole skill expression
• Losing your combo hurts more than losing a life does, since it kills your score multiplier immediately. One clipped hit late in a run can cost more than the wave that caused it
• Full analog steering (mouse, drag, or keys) instead of lane-locked movement means dodging diving fire is about reading trajectories, not memorizing patterns