NEON VELOCITY Play now

Godot 4.3 · MIT · zero asset files

NEON
VELOCITY

A retro side-scrolling shooter where every sprite is rasterised and every sound is synthesised at runtime. No PNGs, no OGGs, no fonts — the repository is pure code, and the game draws itself the moment it starts.

Play in browser Download builds Source
6 weapons 18 mods 4 bosses 24 sfx 0 assets
Neon Velocity gameplay: the player ship firing a long stream of plasma bolts into a formation of orange drones.
chunk_03 · plasma cannon1080p capture
01

What's in the game

Six weapons with five levels each, eighteen mods, endless procedural levels and four bosses on a five-chunk cycle.

Six weapons

Plasma cannon, spread shot, laser lance, seeker missiles, railgun and nova burst. Each levels up from kills — XP is earned, not bought.

Eighteen mods

Chain lightning, ricochet, life siphon, MIRV splits, EMP slows, pulsar novas. Picking one pauses the run and offers three cards.

Endless, seeded levels

The world is a strip of 2400-unit chunks generated from seed + chunk index, so a given seed always produces the same run.

Four bosses

Core Interceptor, Void Warden, Neon Titan and The Architect — each with its own patterns and a phase change every quarter of its health.

Nothing to install

Sprites come out of the Image API in a fixed 16-colour palette; sound effects are packed into AudioStreamWAV from float buffers.

Adaptive audio

Four synthesised layers — bass, lead, pad, drums — crossfade as you get deeper into a run, over 24 procedural effects.

02

Screens

Captured from the web build running in Chromium at 1920×1080. Click any frame for the full-size PNG.

Combat: the ship firing a long line of cyan plasma bolts at a formation of orange drones, with pickups drifting nearby.
Combat — plasma bolts, drone formation, health and shield in the top-left panel
The Core Interceptor boss health bar across the top of the screen while the player fights through drones.
Boss — the Core Interceptor, four phases, five-chunk cycle
A swarm of drones converging from the right while the player ship threads between them.
Swarm — formations converge from the right
The pause menu, with resume, restart, settings and quit, over the frozen game.
Pause — restart, settings, quit to menu
The title screen: NEON VELOCITY in cyan with a pink offset shadow, over a starfield.
Title — difficulty select and best score, drawn with the game's own generated textures
03

Controls

The same build plays with a keyboard or with two thumbs; the on-screen controls only appear when a touchscreen is present.

Keyboard & mouse

WASD / arrows
Move
Z / left click
Fire (hold)
Space / Shift
Dash — brief invulnerability
Q / E
Switch weapon
Esc
Pause

Touch

Left half
Floating stick — drag anywhere to fly
FIRE
Hold to fire
DASH
Dash
WPN
Next weapon
Top-right
Pause

Play in landscape. Portrait shows a rotate prompt, and the first tap on the web build asks for fullscreen.

04

Get it

Every build is produced by CI on a version tag — web, Linux, Windows and macOS are attached to the same release.

Browser wasm · installs as an app · works offline Play now → Windows x86_64 · zip · 30 MB Download → Linux x86_64 · zip · 24 MB Download → macOS universal · zip · 51 MB Download →

Unsigned binaries. The desktop builds are not code-signed — Windows SmartScreen and macOS Gatekeeper will both ask you to confirm. On macOS, right-click the app and choose Open the first time. The web build needs a keyboard and a desktop-class browser.

05

How it's built

A Godot 4.3 project with no assets, no network calls and no plugins, plus a pipeline that tests and ships it.

The brief this came from promised a shooter with zero external assets, and the interesting part is that it is literally true: the repository contains GDScript, three shaders, five scene files and two tools. Everything you see on screen is generated by scripts/core/Art.gd at startup — polygons rasterised into an Image, quantised to a 16-colour CGA-style palette, wrapped in an ImageTexture.

Audio works the same way. scripts/core/AudioManager.gd synthesises FM tones, sweeps, noise bursts and arpeggios into float buffers and packs them into 16-bit PCM AudioStreamWAV resources. The four music layers are 6.857-second loops at 140 BPM — four bars — mixed live as the run gets deeper.

Systems talk through a signal bus rather than reaching into each other, bullets and enemies are pooled, and the level generator is seeded, so the same seed replays the same chunk layout.

Read the source

  1. 01

    Runtime art

    17 sprite generators — ships, drones, the boss core, pickups, starfield, nebula, mountain ridge.
  2. 02

    Runtime audio

    24 effects plus four music layers, all synthesised into PCM at startup in well under a second.
  3. 03

    Tested in CI

    32 headless assertions drive a real run, and a 50-second soak reaches the first boss. Both gate every push.
  4. 04

    One command to ship

    git tag v1.1.0 && git push --tags builds four platforms and publishes the release.