EmojiSurvivors 💀

A spooky, browser-based Vampire Survivors-style bullet-heaven roguelite where every character, monster, projectile, and pickup is an emoji. Ships in two flavors from one codebase — a top-down 2D canvas game and a first-person 3D (Three.js) rewrite that shares the exact same simulation.

▶ Play: https://dev.jdayers.com/survivors/ — pick 2D Classic or 3D FPS.

Pick a survivor, choose how long you dare to last, then auto-attack endless swarms while you dodge, level up, and stitch together a synergistic loadout — until the boss shows up at the deadline. Coins persist between runs to power up your account.

Features

• 10 characters — six free (knight, mage, rogue, druid, barbarian, necromancer) and four coin-unlocked (witch, ninja, pumpkin king, reaper). Each has a starting weapon, a stat tilt, and a unique gimmick: glass-cannon double-fire, missing-HP rage, regen, greed, armor, life-on-hit, 4-card draws, dodge, attacker-reflect, low-HP execute.
• 11 weapons + their evolutions — aimed bolts, dagger spreads, a whip cone, a thorn aura, lobbed axes, orbiting orbs, throwing stars, a moon scythe, a pumpkin bomb, bone spears — each evolves at max level when paired with its partner passive.
• 10 passives and a 17-row account-wide power grid (permanent, coin-bought), including an infinite Ascension row so coins always have a use.
• Enemy tiers that unlock as the run heats up, elites that drop chests, and a boss per run length — 5 / 10 / 15 / 30 min. Kill it to win.
• Leaderboards — local records plus an opt-in online global board, split by length, standard/endless, and normal/hard.
• Modifiers including Hard Mode (roughly triple the threat — standing still is fatal), Endless, and a stack of run mutators, unlocked by playing and winning.
• Hidden easter eggs — disco wisps, a fast-talking Karen, mimic chests, a graveyard cat, a Konami secret, seasonal surprises, and more. Edit your save and… find out.
• 1-of-3 (luck → 4) level-up draws with banish + reroll, XP gems, magnet, chests, revives. WebAudio SFX synthesized at runtime (zero audio files), particles, screen shake, and a drifting graveyard backdrop. Installable PWA, fully offline.
• Two dimensions, one sim — a 2D top-down build and a 3D first-person build (mouse-look, trigger fire, an instanced billboard world) that runs the identical engine.
• 4-player online co-op — host-authoritative WebRTC P2P with per-player level-ups, plus full gamepad support. (Save data and leaderboards are shared across both versions.)

Controls

• 2D desktop: WASD / arrow keys to move. Esc / P to pause. Attacks are automatic.
• 2D mobile: hold/drag anywhere — your survivor walks toward your finger. One-handed.
• 3D: mouse-look + WASD, click to fire (or Auto Fire); touch has a dual-zone stick + look.
• Gamepad: left stick moves, right stick aims/looks, trigger fires, Start pauses.

Tech

Vanilla ES modules, buildless (no framework, no bundler, no build step). The simulation is a DOM-free, deterministic fixed-timestep (60 Hz) engine decoupled from a per-frame requestAnimationFrame canvas renderer — so balance is frame-rate independent and the whole game is headless-testable under Node. Menu/HUD chrome is Web Awesome + Font Awesome Pro, emojis are the canvas sprites. Those two are paid Fonticons assets and are not included in this repo — see Vendored assets below.

Project layout

One tree, one deploy — the renderer-agnostic core lives in Shared/, and the two version folders only carry their renderer, input, camera, and shell.

Index.html    version picker (2D Classic / 3D FPS)
Shared/
  Engine/   fixed-timestep loop · seeded RNG · run state · state machine
  World/    spatial hash (collision) · object pool
  Systems/  movement · spawner · weapons · combat · pickups · leveling · stats · evolutions   (pure, DOM-free)
  Content/  characters · weapons · passives · enemies · bosses · power grid · curves          (data-driven)
  Net/      WebRTC co-op — signaling · peer · binary snapshot protocol · session
  Meta/     versioned localStorage save · account state · local + online leaderboards
  Audio/    WebAudio SFX synth
  UI/       Web Awesome screens + HUD
  Styles/   shared CSS · Vendor/ (Web Awesome + Font Awesome — bring your own, not committed)
2d/         Index · ServiceWorker · Source/{Main, Render (canvas), Input, Camera}
3d/         Index · ServiceWorker · Source/{Main, Render (Three.js), Input (FPS), Camera, Vendor/Three}
Tests/      zero-dep unit suite + seeded sim probe

The PHP backends (online leaderboard + co-op signaling) live in Api/ and deploy separately via rsync. The endpoint code is in the repo, but the signing salts (Api/Secret.php — copy Api/Secret.example.php) and the live JSON data stores are not.

Adding content (a new weapon, enemy, character, power-grid row) is data-only — drop a def into Shared/Content/* and it bolts on without touching the systems.

Vendored assets

This repo does not include Font Awesome Pro or Web Awesome — they are commercial Fonticons products that can't be redistributed. To run the UI, drop your own licensed copies into (both are gitignored):

• Shared/Vendor/FontAwesome/ — Font Awesome's css/ + webfonts/ (Pro or Free).
• Shared/Vendor/WebAwesome/ — a Web Awesome build.

Three.js (3D build, 3d/Source/Vendor/Three/) is MIT-licensed and is included.

License

Personal project. Font Awesome Pro and Web Awesome are commercial Fonticons products and are not included here — supply your own under your own license (see Vendored assets).

Built with Claude Code.