BAD SECTOR

You are the last intact data block on a dying floppy. A virus is eating the disk one sector at a time. Survive until the drive finishes recovering itself.

207,872 bytes. That is the whole game — engine, renderer, synthesizer, font, every sprite and every sound. It was built for a contest with a hard 1,474,560-byte ceiling and it came in with 1.2 MB to spare.

How it plays

You never press a fire button. Your weapons shoot on their own, so the entire game is movement — reading the arc the swarm comes from, holding the open lane, and deciding when it is worth crossing the room for a heal.

• 3 to 6 minute runs. Fill the RECOVERY bar and the disk is saved.
• Pick 1 of 3 upgrades every level. Orbiting drives, forked scans, mines, magnets — your build shows as icons along the bottom of the screen.
• FORMAT wipes the screen when you are surrounded. It recharges. Use it late.
• Bosses — SEEK HEAD, FAT TABLE, CRC LOOP — arrive on a timer, not on a kill count.
• EASY / NORMAL / HARD, which change the length of the run, not just the numbers.

Two ways to play

The browser version is a free demo. It is the same game compiled to WebAssembly and it plays exactly like the full one — upgrades, bosses, every difficulty. It simply stops partway, once the disk is 60% recovered. No sign-up, nothing to install: click and play.

The Windows download is the whole disk — every run played to the end, and the real artifact besides: a single 207,872-byte .exe with no installer, no runtime and no asset files, which is the thing that actually fits on a floppy with 1.2 MB to spare. That one is a paid download.

How it was made

Plain C11 against the Win32 API. No engine, no libraries, no asset files at all.

• Renderer — 320x200, 8-bit palette, software, blitted through GDI
• Audio — real-time chiptune synthesizer written on waveOut
• Art, sound and icon — generated in code at startup, no asset files
• Font — a 6x8 bitmap face drawn for this game, 768 bytes of glyphs
• Linking — static, so no Visual C++ redistributable is needed
• Dependencies — USER32, GDI32, WINMM, KERNEL32, all stock Windows

The browser version is the same game code compiled with Emscripten; only the platform layer differs, and that layer sits on SDL2 for the canvas, keyboard and audio device. The Windows build links nothing but the operating system.

Controls

• Arrows / WASD — move
• Space — dash, brief invulnerability
• X or Shift — FORMAT, clear the screen
• P — pause
• M — mute
• F11 — fullscreen

On a phone or tablet: drag anywhere on the left to move — wherever your thumb lands becomes the centre — and Dash and Format are buttons. Turn the device sideways for a bigger picture.