Mission Brief
- Use the lower disk like a thumbstick: ride the rim to steer and move.
- When a monster fills the lane, tap the center of the disk immediately.
- Clear every enemy in the zone to trigger the next descent.
Field Note: Treat it like a tiny arcade cabinet: keep your thumb on the disk rim to move, then stab the center to fire.
Controls
- Touch or click inside the lower control disk.
- Push up to move forward, down to back up, and left or right to turn.
- Tap the center of the disk to fire once the enemy eyes line up with the reticle.
Behind The Scenes
I was excited by the idea of compressing something that actually looked like a 3D shooter into a QR-code-sized payload. A good reference point was The Backdooms, which is a very cool project and whose README describes it as an approximately 2.5kb QR-doom-style game. The constraint here was harsher: keep the final payload under 2,048 characters so it fits inside the URL limits used by many websites, social posts, and link shorteners.
That made 2,048 a useful hard upper bound. The interesting part was seeing Codex work out how to fake a 3D environment inside that limit. A lot of the core feel came directly from Codex choices, including the corridor renderer, the enemy construction, and the way the whole thing can still feel like a shooter even when it is brutally compressed.
The newer version is less about spectacle for its own sake and more about legibility. It keeps the same tiny-shooter premise, but spends more of the budget on progression, clearer enemy behavior, and a stronger sense that each zone is something you survive and then descend beyond.
Updated after working on the Red Belt games and realizing that you could get pretty good playability with the center pad, I decided to add that into this to make it a lot more easy to play because it was pretty hard to understand how the controls worked before.