About Swarm Dodge
No weapon, no dash, no shield — just you and a field filling up with monsters. Collect the motes to score, and score again by passing close enough to a monster to feel it. Hugging a corner keeps you alive and earns nothing, so every run is a question of how near you are willing to go. Treants walk straight at you, imps wobble so they cannot be dodged on a line, bats weave, wizards aim where you are going, and mages arrive in threes to close off a direction. Runs are short. Losing one is the normal outcome.
How to play
- Move by dragging, holding the mouse button, or using WASD or the arrow keys. Your character walks towards your finger or pointer.
- Collect the orange motes for 5 points each. Three are on the field, and a new one appears whenever you take one.
- Pass close to a monster without touching it for a graze worth 1 point, paid once per pass.
- Monsters walk in from off screen. There are two at the start, then one more every 5 seconds, and all of them get faster each time.
- Touch any monster and the run ends at once.
Tips
- Corners score nothing. Motes are placed away from you and grazes need a monster nearby, so hiding in a corner only delays the end. A treant walking straight at you will pin you there anyway.
- Never flee a wizard in a straight line. Wizards aim at where you are heading, not where you are. Running straight away leads you into its path; turn sharply as one closes in instead.
- Give imps room early. Imps are the fastest creatures and wobble as they come, so a last-moment sidestep is unreliable. Move off their path while they are still some distance away.
- Mages arrive in threes. A pack of three mages spreads out around you to close off a direction. Leave through the widest gap before they arrive rather than waiting to see where they settle.
- Use the quiet start. For the first 8 seconds only treants and imps are sent in. That is the easiest time to collect motes before bats, wizards and mages join the swarm.
Read the full Swarm Dodge guide (5 min read)
From the developer
Swarm Dodge was the first game I built on a small shared runtime I wrote for my one-verb games, which handles loading, screen fitting, input, sound and saving. The game itself is about 500 lines of plain JavaScript on a 2D canvas.
The design is one verb: you move. There is no weapon, dash or shield, and you are faster than every monster, so staying alive is easy and scoring is not. Motes are worth 5 and spawn far away; a graze, passing close to a monster, is worth 1. Each of the five creatures has to be dodged differently: the treant is huge and slow, the imp wobbles, the bat weaves, the wizard aims where you are going, and mages arrive in threes.
The sprites are rendered from the KayKit Adventurers Character Pack by Kay Lousberg and Monsters Ultimate Pack 09 Cute Series by Meshtint Studio, reused byte for byte from Run and Gun. Because the rules have no drawing code in them I could test them as arithmetic, and one of the 21 tests caught a bug play never would have: a graze at time zero counted as never grazed, so the first monster of every run paid out on every frame.
Son Hoang, who made Swarm Dodge
Update history
- Added looping background music from Vasco Grossmann's Fantasy Music Lite.
- The score readout now sits in the centre of the top bar; it had drifted a third of the way across.
- Monsters and your character now face the way they are moving. Before this, every figure was drawn about 90 degrees off.
- First release: move to collect motes and graze past five kinds of monster for points.
Questions
Does Swarm Dodge save my progress?
It saves your best score in this browser's local storage, and shows it on the pause sheet and the end card. Nothing else carries over, so every run starts with two monsters. A private window may not keep it.
Can I play Swarm Dodge on a phone?
Yes. Drag anywhere and your character walks towards your finger, so your thumb is never covering it. The arena fits the screen whether you hold the phone upright or sideways.
Why do monsters never appear right next to me?
Every new monster spawns just outside the screen, on the edge furthest from where you are standing. Anything that catches you has walked the whole way, so watch the edges.
Is there an ending?
No. Monsters keep arriving until 34 are on the field, and their speed keeps rising for as long as the run lasts, so every run ends when something catches you. The goal is a new best.
