DEBLOCK//4

A Zaxxon-Stunt-Racer style rhythm shooter. Ten levels, ten original tracks by NO3Z. The corridor breathes with the music and your cannon fires locked to a sixteenth-note grid — and every kill answers with a note.

The sequel to deBlock 3 for OUYA, rebuilt in 3D for the browser with Babylon.js. You fly from the cockpit, down a neon corridor that reshapes itself to the song you are about to reach.

Flight manual

MOVE — WASD, arrow keys or the touch joystick. Steering is continuous in both axes: slide across the corridor and climb or dive through four altitude lanes.

MATCH THE LANE — Your shots collide only with threats in your own altitude lane. Lining up a target is a vertical move, not a horizontal one.

WATCH THE GHOSTS — Anything outside your lane is drawn as a glowing wireframe. Solid means it can hit you and you can hit it; ghost means fly on, or climb into it.

READ THE SHADOWS — Every threat drops a mark on the road and reports itself on the altitude panel. An enemy that looks like it is in your face may be a band above you. The shadow never lies about which lane it is really in.

FIRE ON THE GRID — Hold Space or FIRE. Shots are quantized to the sixteenth, so holding the trigger plays the song with you rather than over it.

LISTEN TO YOUR KILLS — Each kill sounds a note from that level's own scale, on the grid, and how long the note rings tells you what you killed: a sixteenth for popcorn, a half note for a boss. Nothing is ever dropped — a dense wave tightens into an arpeggio instead of losing notes, and the notes walk across the stereo field as they sound.

BUILD THE COMBO — Kills in quick succession raise the score multiplier, and it decays the moment you stop. Every tenth kill hands you something back: a weapon level, a drone, a life.

UPGRADE THE CANNON — Level 1 is a single bolt, level 2 fires three in parallel, level 3 adds a climbing and a diving shot that damage the neighbouring bands — the only shots in the game that leave your lane. Up to two drones fly escort.

KEEP MOVING — Overlapping formations only separate when you move. Standing still is what makes them unreadable.

The camera is part of the game

You fly from the pilot's eye. Pull back with the wheel or a pinch and the lens walks out along one continuous arm — a chase pose first, then a wide tactical read — and everything follows from the arm's length: the framing, the field of view, the roll, whether you see your own hull. Look around freely to find what the perspective is hiding.

And once per level, the camera leaves you. On the strongest drop the song has, the lens swings out of the cockpit into a full 2D view: a Gradius side profile, or a 1942 view straight down. The two alternate as you play — odd levels look down, even levels look across.

Inside that window the rules change, because the view means it. The axis the lens cannot show freezes and the whole fight collapses onto the plane you can see, so nothing is hidden in depth any more. The stick's spare axis becomes a depth throttle — you push into the screen instead of across it. Bullets fan out in the plane of the screen. In the side view the columns retire, because a column you cannot dodge is not an obstacle. It lasts up to sixteen bars, and it closes in time for what comes next.

The boss

The boss is fought from the cockpit, with all four lanes live — no camera tricks at the climax.

Its health is not a number someone typed: it is derived from how many seconds the fight should last with the loadout you actually arrive holding. Which means the track can run out before the boss does, and in most levels it will. The music ending is not the finish line. When the song stops, the fight simply carries on in silence — the boss keeps firing on the beat, the world keeps scrolling, your kill notes keep ringing — until one of you is gone.

The world

Ten biomes and ten palettes: neon grid, canyon, crystal, ruins, asteroid field, cloud deck, portal run, skyline, industrial, city.

• The scenery re-forms while you fly. Each stretch of corridor is re-laid as it recycles, and it is shaped by the energy of the music at the moment you will arrive there — so the city is already tall when the drop lands.
• Nothing sits still: structures bob, sway, breathe and travel, and the amplitude is handed to the live bass, so a wall that moves moves with the track.
• The light is permanently on a journey between stops, never a colour that snaps on and off. Caves swallow the corridor, blackouts drop it, strobes chop it.
• Cross a checkpoint and its number is painted on the road ahead of you, stretched down the tarmac so it reads from a hand's height at speed, like real road paint.

Controls

Desktop

• WASD / arrow keys — steer, climb, dive
• Space — hold to fire on the grid
• Mouse move — look
• Mouse wheel, or right button + vertical drag — pull the camera back and in
• Esc / P — pause

Mobile

• Touch joystick — steer, climb, dive
• FIRE — hold to shoot on the grid
• Drag outside the controls — look
• Two-finger pinch — pull the camera back and in
• Pause button — pause
• Portrait and landscape both supported, and the layout survives turning the phone mid-flight

Features

• NO3Z // TEN SIGNALS — ten levels driven by ten original tracks
• A different ship every level, ten in all
• No demo mode as mention is just painful
• Four-lane altitude combat with continuous vertical flight and ghost-wireframe threat reading
• Rhythm-quantized cannon, and a melodic kill layer that plays the level's scale, in tempo, note length by what you killed
• One scripted 2D view per level — Gradius side or 1942 top-down, alternating — with the fight, the controls and the guns re-aimed to match
• Bosses sized in seconds of fighting, that outlive their own soundtrack
• Weapon levels, escort drones, extra lives, combo multiplier
• A world that re-forms as it recycles, moves with the bass and travels through light
• Checkpoint numbers painted on the tarmac, and locally saved campaign progress
• Low-poly retrofuturist neon, one shared Web Audio graph for music and synths
• Keyboard, mouse and full multitouch; plays in a desktop or mobile browser

Made with Babylon.js + Web Audio. A NO3Z Productionz game.