Yard Wars

A fast top-down arena shooter for Android and desktop, made with LÖVE. Pick a rowdy, fight bots or friends in your Wi-Fi, smash treasure chests for coins and unlock new rowdies.

Play it: download and installation instructions are on the website, http://yardwars.zeromips.org/. Installed copies update themselves.

Features

• Nineteen rowdies, each with its own attack and a super attack: Shotgunner, Gunner, Sniper, Robot, Gardener, Pirate, Student, Chef, Agent Angel, Doctor Fizzle, Wrestler, Digger, Ghostman, Wizard, Posion, Fruit Man, Officer, Mecha Robot and Tornalo (the last thirteen designed by Gideon)
• Hide and seek: one seeker, five hiders who turn into bushes when they stand still, and a picture puzzle that makes the round shorter
• A free Yard Pass with seasons, challenges that never expire and cosmetics to win
• Flower Gardens: four teams carry flowers home to their fenced gardens; every five flowers bring a toy bulldozer that knocks down another team's fence
• Modes: Duel, Team fight (3 vs 3), Waves, Yardball, King of the Yard, Hide and seek and Flower Gardens, against bots
• Play together in the same Wi-Fi: free-for-all, team fight, co-op waves, Yardball, King of the Yard, Hide and seek and Flower Gardens, the host is found automatically
• Touch controls (move stick, aim and release to fire) and keyboard + mouse
• New rowdies: save up coins (treasure chests, round rewards) and beat the rowdy in a boss fight - you can't lose, you pop back in until it's out (alone or with friends)
• Signed automatic updates

Running from source

Install LÖVE 11.5, then in this folder:

love .

A checkout like this never updates itself; only packaged builds do.

Useful options for testing: --rowdy N (start with rowdy N), --coins N (add coins), --boss N [host] (boss fight against rowdy N), --host [team|waves|yardball|king|hide|flowers] and --join <address> / --find (LAN game on one machine: run two instances). Playing over the network uses UDP ports 27015 and 27016.

Project layout

• main.lua - screens, game loop, camera, HUD
• src/world.lua - the game simulation (no graphics, also runs on the LAN host)
• src/rowdies.lua - the rowdies' stats and supers
• src/net.lua, src/replica.lua - LAN multiplayer
• src/updater.lua, src/rsa.lua - signed self-updates over http
• tools/ - packaging (build.sh), publishing (publish.sh, needs the signing key) and the sprite cutter for the character art
• website/ - the static website

CLAUDE.md has the detailed developer notes.

Credits

Yard Wars is a father-and-son project by Gideon and Dirk Eibach. Code written with the help of an AI assistant (Claude); character art generated with Google Gemini. Arena tiles from the Top-down Shooter pack by Kenney (CC0). See CREDITS.md.

License

MIT, see LICENSE.