HOW IT STARTED
Dead City: Last Officer Standing started with a single question — what if a pixel art zombie shooter could run entirely in a browser, with zero barriers between a player and the game?
"Click the link. Play. No installs. No accounts. No loading screens. Just a cop, a gun, and a city full of zombies." — Indie Developer
What began as a weekend project in HTML5 Canvas grew into a full game with 4 weapons, 4 arenas, 5 playable characters, a coin economy, a shop, procedural pixel art sprites, and a Web Audio engine — all built from scratch in vanilla JavaScript.
SOLO INDIE PROJECT
Dead City is made by one person — Indie Developer. No studio. No team. No budget. Every mechanic, every sprite, every sound effect in the game is built by hand.
The game is completely free and will always be free. No paywalls, no pay-to-win. Just a love of top-down shooters and pixel art.
BUILT WITH
No game engine. Everything is hand-coded open web tech.
🎨
HTML5 CANVAS
All rendering via Canvas 2D API. image-rendering: pixelated for sharp sprites.
⚙️
VANILLA JS
Game loop, AI, physics, collision — all pure JavaScript. No libraries.
🔊
WEB AUDIO API
Procedural sound engine. Every gunshot and explosion generated in real-time.
🚀
GITHUB PAGES
Hosted free with global CDN. Zero server costs.
THE JOURNEY
V0.1
FIRST PROTOTYPE
Basic canvas rendering, one weapon, one zombie type. The core loop: move, shoot, survive.
V0.3
PIXEL SPRITES
All sprites drawn procedurally from grid data. Officer, zombies, weapons — all pixel art generated in JS.
V0.5
AUDIO ENGINE
Web Audio API sound system. Gunshots, reloads, explosions — all synthesised from oscillators and noise.
V0.8
SHOP & CHARACTERS
Coin system, weapon upgrades, and 5 unlockable characters with unique stats and passives.
V1.0
PUBLIC LAUNCH
4 arenas, 4 weapons, 4 zombie types, leaderboard, full shop. Live on GitHub Pages.
DESIGN VALUES
⚡
INSTANT ACCESS
No barriers. Click and play. Always.
🎮
GAMEPLAY FIRST
Every feature must make the game more fun. If it doesn't, it doesn't ship.
🆓
ALWAYS FREE
No paywalls. No pay-to-win. The full game — free forever.
🔁
REPLAYABILITY
Randomised spawns, scaling difficulty. Every run is different.