Star Defender

Star Defender is an original free browser arcade shooter built around one clean loop: dodge, shoot, collect and climb. Your ship starts with three lives and a single-shot cannon. Enemies arrive in procedural waves that mix straight divers, weaving ships and firing lanes. Every five waves a Void Warden boss arrives with more health and a rotating set of attacks. Meteors fall through the sector during the run and can be shattered for points, but touching one or an enemy costs a life. Weapon pickups upgrade the cannon from single to double to triple shot; shields absorb one hit, life pickups add a life, and bombs clear enemy fire while damaging everything on screen. The run has no final wave, so your best score and highest wave are the goals. Daily seeds replay the same wave sequence for everyone.

How to play

• Move with the arrow keys or W A S D. On touch screens, drag anywhere on the playfield; the ship follows your finger.
• Auto-fire is on during play. Space or J also fires, and a mouse click fires immediately.
• Press P or use the in-game pause button to pause. The Shell pause card can resume the run.
• Press B or the Bomb button to clear enemy bullets and damage every enemy. Bombs are capped at three.
• Weapon power-ups stop at triple shot. Lives stop at five; shields do not stack.
• Every fifth wave is a boss wave. Bosses drop several pickups when defeated.
• Add ?seed=YYYYMMDD to the page URL to replay the same enemy wave sequence for that day.

Scoring

• Straight divers score 10, weaving ships score 20, and firing ships score 30.
• Meteors score 5. Bosses score 200–500 depending on the wave.
• Your best score and highest wave are saved through the Shell; both stay on this device.
• No final wave exists. Difficulty rises smoothly and is capped so the run stays playable.

Controls and accessibility

The playfield is a focusable canvas with an accessible description. Every button has an accessible name, touch targets are at least 44×44 pixels, and the game can be paused and restarted from the keyboard or the Shell toolbar. Important events such as boss arrivals, pickups and game over are announced through a polite live region. The game honours prefers-reduced-motion by removing screen shake and non-essential motion while keeping the full game playable.

Privacy and original content

Star Defender runs inside a sandboxed iframe. It does not collect personal data, does not load analytics, advertising or social tracking scripts, and does not request consent itself. Only the best score and best wave are sent through game:save so the Shell can store them in this game's own local-storage namespace. If the Host reports that storage is unavailable, the run still works and the values stay in memory for the session. The game name, ships, enemies, boss, meteors, pickups, pixel art, music and sound effects are original or generated in this repository; no third-party characters, audio, level layouts or trademarks are used.