Dead Rise

You raised the undead: can you send them back to hell?

Borland Stone is a necromancer: meddling with things he shouldn't is part of his job description. But even he admits that summoning Droggadon the Unholy, Lord of the Sixth Circle of Hell was, in retrospect, a bad idea. Droggadon summoned an undead army of his own, invaded the kingdom, and now sits atop the throne. It's time clean up the mess: Borland must battle through the countryside, storm the castle, and send the demon back to hell. 

About game

Become the necromancer Borland Stone and blast your way through hordes of undead to fix his mistake in this 5 minute adventure. 

• Explore the dangerous countryside and a haunted castle in 8 unique levels
• Cast potent magic spells to incinerate the undead and teleport through walls
• Battle ghosts, ghouls, and the mighty demon lord Droggadon

How to play

• WASD to move
• arrow keys to shoot a fireball
• space to teleport

How the game was made

The game was designed with NES-like constraints. The game's graphics were written for the PPU466, an artificially constrained graphics API designed to mimic the NES's picture processing unit. This means:

• only 8 palettes of 3 colors each
• a total of 256 unique tiles (including animation frames)
• only 64 8x8 sprites ("movable" tiles that update each frame)

The music was composed using only the sound channels available on the NES's audio processing unit: 2 square, 1 triangle, 1 noise, and 1 sample channel. 

The game was written in modern C++, compiled to Web Assembly, and uses much more CPU than was available on the NES.

Tools & Technologies:

• Sprites were created with https://www.piskelapp.com/
• Levels were created with Tiled
• Music was created with https://famistudio.org/
• the code was forked from CMU 15-466's game1
• A* algorithm for real-time enemy path finding

About the creators

Tim Mastny is the founder and creative director of the fictional company McCoke Productions. He programmed and designed the game. Find him at https://timmastny.com/.

Michaela Mastny created the art.

Ian Wright composed the music and sound effects.

We made this game to learn, share with our friends, and have fun! The game is not a polished commercial product, but we made every effort to create a coherent, bug-free experience during our little free time. We hope you think it's fun or at least neat!