make-ready

make ready is a browser game about leading a small squad of musket soldiers out from a home village into increasingly dangerous wild territory to collect treasure and fight enemies. The farther east a player pushes, the tougher the enemies get, but the better the loot becomes. What makes the project stand out is its music system, built with a live coding music tool called Strudel, which shifts in real time based on what is happening in the game, staying calm near the village, growing tense in dangerous ground, and building into a driving combat theme as a fight escalates.

Players move freely with no turns, switch between a rifle and a sword, and give orders to two allied soldiers, such as forming a firing line, charging with swords, or holding position and shooting at will. The game recreates a real musket drill rhythm: after firing a volley the guns are empty until the player orders everyone to reload and reform the line. Five enemy types are unlocked gradually as the player advances into more dangerous ground, each with a different fighting style shown by the color of their coat. Treasure and healing supplies are scattered through the world, but any loot a player is carrying is lost if their character falls in the field, so it only counts once carried back to the village.

The game is built with the Phaser game framework and Vite for building the project, and it generates every sprite at startup rather than using external art files. Development requires installing Node packages and running a local dev server, and the project includes an automated headless test that boots the game and checks for errors before each deployment to GitHub Pages. A separate command packages a version for uploading to itch.io.

The project is released under the GNU AGPL 3.0 license because it embeds the AGPL licensed Strudel music library, which requires the whole game's source code to stay open.