Gatecrasher
Game
Gatecrasher is a third-person stealth game that runs in a browser. You play Big Chum, a legendary soldier every soldier on the island dreams of serving with. You infiltrate one quarter of a walled island outpost with a silenced pistol, a portal gun and a mule, and the same zone serves four missions: rescue a captured commando, eliminate an officer in a red beret, recover a prototype from somewhere on the site, and destroy the Deterrence Unit, an unpiloted walking weapons platform as tall as a building that stands in the middle of the yard. Each mission tells you only the objective. Where the commando is held, which of three officers is the colonel, and where the case went, you learn by interrogating soldiers. Every mission ends when you reach the landing zone. In the last one you climb the Deterrence Unit tier by tier past its deck crew, set charges on both knees, the reactor and the cockpit, set them off from at least 70 metres away, and hold out until the helicopter lands.
Soldiers see and hear in the manner of Metal Gear Solid V. The sight of each soldier near you is drawn on the ground. An awareness meter rises faster the closer and plainer you are, and how far he can see you depends on a camo index: your uniform against the ground underfoot, your stance, your movement and your cover, as in Metal Gear Solid 3. Footsteps carry further when you run and further still indoors. When a soldier spots you, the game slows for two and a half seconds to give you one chance to put him down; after that the base goes to alert, and one bullet kills you. In an alert each soldier hunts where he last knew you to be, so breaking line of sight and moving sends them to the wrong place. Tranquilliser rounds are silent and the soldier wakes five minutes later and radios it in; lethal rounds are loud and leave a body. You can creep up and grab a soldier from behind to interrogate him, choke him out or kill him, hold one up at gunpoint, take his rifle from the front, carry bodies into bushes and lockers, hide in a locker or a cardboard box, and switch on active camo. Two portals, blue and orange, open on walls and floors in sight and carry you between them with your speed; each shows the view out of the other, and a shot into one comes out of the other. Only the elite soldiers' lenses can see them. The Memphis Mule follows you unseen, comes to a whistle, rams a soldier over, carries a tied soldier who then nearly always talks, carries the rescued Corporal Grace, and can be ridden, fast and loud. The outpost's soldiers hate serving it: the ones you send up on a balloon thank you on landing and sign on at your base, Graceland, whose staff improve your kit for the next mission.
Every rule runs in a Rust core in fixed-point integer maths, compiled to WebAssembly, and the page draws what the core returns. The menu art is drawn in TikZ.
Playing it
W, A, S and D move and the mouse looks. C crouches, Z goes prone and Shift sprints. Space vaults onto or over low things, leaps up to hang from a higher ledge (A and D shimmy along it, W climbs up, C lets go), and out of a sprint dives, knocking over a soldier in the way. The right button aims and the left fires; T switches between tranquilliser and lethal rounds. Q and R open the two portals. F grabs a soldier, and E interrogates him, picks things up and opens lockers. G sends a soldier up on a balloon. H whistles for the mule, M sends him to ram, Y ties a soldier to him and J rides him. V is active camo, B the box, U changes uniform and I shows your intel. Escape pauses. Your recruits and best ranks are kept in the browser you played in.
Checked in Chromium, Firefox and WebKit.