GalactiX

GalactiX is an old-school fixed-screen arcade shooter inspired by the legendary Space Invaders and Galaxian.

The aliens are coming.

Earth is in danger.

Humanity has apparently reviewed all available military options and concluded that its best remaining strategy is:

You. One spaceship. One fire button.

This seems poorly planned.

Nevertheless, take position beneath the invading fleet, dodge incoming trouble and blast your way through wave after wave of increasingly impolite extraterrestrials.

How to Play

Your job is refreshingly uncomplicated:

Destroy the alien invasion before the alien invasion destroys you.

Move your spacecraft across the battlefield, avoid enemy attacks and eliminate the current wave.

Survive long enough and the next wave arrives.

Then another.

The aliens apparently possess an admirably efficient recruitment department.

As you defeat successive waves, your ship receives better weapons, gradually improving your ability to explain Earth's immigration policy.

Controls

• CURSOR KEYS — move the ship
• CTRL — fire

That's it.

No inventory.

No skill tree.

No crafting system.

No dialogue wheel.

Civilization depends on four directions and a trigger.

As it should.

The Invasion

GalactiX follows the classic arcade structure established by the great fixed-screen shooters of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Enemies arrive in waves.

You destroy them.

They become progressively less cooperative.

Your weapons improve.

Eventually somebody explodes.

The subtle narrative implications are left to the player.

Weapon Upgrades

Survive and defeat wave after wave of attackers and your spacecraft is rewarded with improved weapons.

The result is a simple progression system:

• survive,
• destroy aliens,
• become more dangerous,
• meet more aliens,
• discover that they have apparently been following the same development strategy.

Technological escalation remains one of humanity's most reliable traditions.

Features

• Classic fixed-screen arcade shooting.
• Simple, immediate controls.
• Waves of alien attackers.
• Progressive weapon upgrades.
• Increasing arcade challenge.
• Strong Space Invaders and Galaxian inspiration.
• Retro sprite-based presentation.
• Fast games and immediate restarts.
• Runs directly in the browser.
• No complicated explanation for why the aliens hate us.

They just do.

A Little History

GalactiX is a tribute to the pioneering arcade shooters of the late 1970s and early 1980s, particularly Space Invaders and Galaxian.

Space Invaders arrived in 1978 and helped establish many conventions that would define arcade games for years afterward:

waves of enemies, escalating pressure, scoring, limited space and the extremely persuasive argument that everything above you should probably be shot.

The first wave of GalactiX deliberately pays tribute to the familiar invaders from that era.

Not because humanity lacks original enemies.

Out of respect.

Before the ENGINE

GalactiX occupies an interesting place in the history of LaughingSkull.

It predates what would later become the proper LaughingSkull ENGINE.

At this stage, the objective was considerably simpler:

make a game in JavaScript, understand how the pieces fit together, make another game, reuse whatever survived, and gradually discover that reusable code has an alarming tendency to become architecture.

A few games later, while developing Castle Haunt, that collection of reusable systems began turning into an actual game engine.

From there things got somewhat out of hand.

Under the Hood

GalactiX was originally written in 2017 using JavaScript and jQuery.

It belongs to the earliest generation of my browser games, long before WebGL, GLSL shaders, procedural 3D worlds and the increasingly elaborate machinery of the modern LaughingSkull ENGINE.

The game was remastered in 2024, allowing this small piece of the site's history to survive alongside its considerably larger descendants.

Looking back, GalactiX is almost comically modest compared with later projects.

A spaceship.

Some sprites.

Some aliens.

Some bullets.

And code.

Lots of code.

It turns out that was enough to start something.

From GalactiX to Hauntessa

In my retrospective on the LaughingSkull ENGINE, GalactiX sits at one end of the timeline.

At the other end are full 3D WebGL adventures such as Haunting the Hauntessa.

Between them lie years of progressively more unreasonable experiments involving:

• reusable game objects,
• grid systems,
• collision detection,
• pathfinding,
• procedural generation,
• raycasting,
• WebGL,
• GLSL shaders,
• 2D and 3D engines,
• and an impressive quantity of bugs produced entirely in-house.

GalactiX itself is small.

Its place in that progression is not.

Every oversized game engine needs somewhere embarrassing to have started.

Play GalactiX

▶ Defend Earth on LaughingSkull.org

Free to play. No account. No installation.

The aliens are invading.

Humanity selected you.

Humanity may have made a mistake.