Mission Brief
- Use short turns to square the reticle with the corridor before pushing forward.
- When a monster fills the lane, tap the fire band immediately.
- Clear every wave to spawn the next floor and keep descending.
Field Note: Treat it like a tiny arcade cabinet: steer in bursts, then fire once the enemy eyes line up with the crosshair.
Controls
- Desktop: W or Up advances, A/D or Left/Right turns, Space fires.
- Phone: upper middle advances, left and right thirds turn, the bottom band fires.
- Keep moving. Monsters only drop when they sit inside the center 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 recoil on the weapon and the basic construction of the enemies. Once the first version came in smaller than expected, I started pushing on things like color shifts between levels and small presentation changes to see how much atmosphere could fit into the remaining space.
This is more of a template than an endpoint. The current compressed payload is about 1,900 characters, which means there is still roughly another 150 characters to spend, plus whatever could be recovered through better optimization. That is part of what makes the project interesting: it already works, but it still clearly points toward other, stranger things that could be packed into the same limit.