"Can it run DOOM?" Yes, sure: calculators, pregnancy tests and potatoes all run DOOM (canitrundoom.org lists 195 of them). This goes the other way. DOOM runs Smash&Clash.
It's not an embed or a web page in a window. The DOOM engine is the client. The 1993 renderer draws the board, the cards and the menus into its own 320×200, 256-colour screen, with its own HUD font, status-bar face, sprites and sounds. Every computer screen in E1M1 shows a live game. And it plays on the same network as everyone else: the website, the apps, Telegram, Minecraft, GTA V, a Nintendo DS, the terminal and AI agents. Rooms, codes and quick match work across all of them.
It's built on the Smash&Clash SDK.
Playing
- Get to the game: walk up to any computer screen in a level and press Use (
Space / E). You can also press C anywhere, or pick SMASH&CLASH in DOOM's main menu. T teleports you to the next computer screen on the level.
- Play the house starts a game now, against an opponent at your level. Quick match joins the queue every Smash&Clash app shares (choose anyone, people or agents). Create a room makes a code anyone joins on any app, and Join a room takes theirs.
- While you play, pick a card with the arrows (or
1–5) and Enter, then a glowing tile. The mouse works too. Tab steps through every legal move by name, R resigns and Esc goes back to DOOM. The game waits on the network, so walk off and come back: the computers show where it stands, and the HUD tells you when it's your turn.
- Mutators and Classic, your rating, and the Game Review's accuracy after each game. Captures go off as rocket explosions, hops use the teleport fog and a Boulder is a BFG blast. Doomguy grins when you take cards.
- Watch a live game puts the network's featured game on the terminal. When you're not playing, the computer screens show it too.
How it works
DOOM has no network, so the page runs @smashandclash/sdk next to the engine. The Smash&Clash GBA client does the same, carrying each call over a bridge.
DOOM (doomgeneric, C -> WebAssembly) the page (JS)
┌───────────────────────────────────┐ snc_push() ┌────────────────────────────┐ HTTPS Smash&Clash
│ engine/snc.c draws, animates, │ <──────────── │ web/bridge.js │ <───────> game network
│ picks moves; wall screens; menu │ ────────────> │ @smashandclash/sdk 0.6.0 │
└───────────────────────────────────┘ snc_js_send() └────────────────────────────┘
bridge.js reads the seat sync (game.sync), the legal moves as data (game.view.moves) and the deck (cards()), and hands the engine snapshots as tab-separated lines. The engine sends back commands: play <move>, house, quick, room, join <code>, watch, resign, leave.- Moves are played by name from the network's legal moves, and the network decides every one. The engine only sees what a player at the table could: your hand, the board, and counts for the other hand.
- The card art, the card back and the logo are baked into a PWAD (
smashandclash.wad) in DOOM's own palette, so the engine draws them like any other graphic.
- The engine is doomgeneric at a pinned commit.
tools/build-wasm.mjs adds a few small hooks: the event chain, the display, the main menu, the USE line check, the wall-texture column fetch and the typed-character path (so cheats still work with WASD).
It follows the client checklist. It hosts by code and opens codes and ?join= / ?game=&invite= links through games.open(). It uses the one quick-match queue and leaves it with leave(). It sends its name (smashandclash-doom), as: 'person' and the player's rating. You are blue and they are orange, their cards face them as at a real table, and every opponent has a name.
Develop
You need Node 20+, Python 3 with Pillow (WebP support) and Emscripten (EMSDK set).
node tools/freedoom.mjs
node tools/fetch-deck.mjs
python tools/bake.py web/freedoom1.wad build/deck.json web/smashandclash.wad
node tools/build-wasm.mjs
node tools/serve.mjs
freedoom.mjs downloads Freedoom 0.13.0 into web/ (checksum-checked). fetch-deck.mjs reads the deck and the client kit through the SDK, and bake.py turns them into the PWAD. build-wasm.mjs compiles doomgeneric with engine/*.c into web/doom.js and web/doom.wasm, and serve.mjs serves web/ at http://localhost:8123/. ?timer=1 drives the engine from setTimeout instead of requestAnimationFrame, for a page in the background (automated tests).
| Part | Does |
|---|
engine/snc.c | The client in DOOM: the terminal (lobby, board, hand, preview, result), picking a move, the animations with DOOM's sprites and sounds, the computer screens, USE and T |
engine/platform.c | DOOM's platform: frames to the canvas, keys and the mouse, sound effects through Web Audio |
web/bridge.js | The Smash&Clash side: runs the SDK, turns the seat sync into snapshots, plays the engine's commands |
web/main.js | The page: loads the WADs and the engine, input, sound, music, shared links |
tools/ | Freedoom, the deck, the PWAD baker, the engine build and a dev server |
Licence
The engine and this repo's C code are GPL-2.0, like doomgeneric and the DOOM source (see LICENSE). web/sdk/ is @smashandclash/sdk (MIT). The game data is Freedoom (BSD-3-Clause); it's downloaded at build time, not committed.
The characters, art, audio and the Smash&Clash name stay Smash&Clash's. They're free to use in clients built for Smash&Clash, never to present as your own (terms).
DOOM is a trademark of id Software. This project uses the open-source engine and Freedoom's free game data, not id's. It isn't affiliated with or endorsed by id Software, Bethesda or ZeniMax. The project photos in the launch film are from canitrundoom.org.
