Fact sheet
- Title
- Beat Patrol
- One line
- A top-down arcade patrol game about a night shift, a quota and a case.
- Release status
- Beta, playable end to end.
- Platforms
- The browser: phones upright or sideways, and desktop. Keyboard, touch or pad.
- Price
- Not decided.
- Size
- 251 KB gzipped, one file, nothing to install.
- Engine
- None. Hand-written, no runtime dependencies, no asset files.
- Typeface
- The game's own lettering, drawn in code. Nothing is loaded from a font service.
- Languages
- English.
- Contact
- @pragmaticrascal
Description
Short
Take the night shift in a top-down arcade city. Write tickets, make the quota, keep the demerits down, and follow the money across nights until the case cracks. Plays in your browser.
Longer
Beat Patrol puts you in the patrol car rather than the one running. Each night you work a beat in a top-down arcade city: stop what needs stopping, hit the quota, and keep the demerit meter off the red, because at a hundred the badge goes. Across twenty-three nights the same streets add up and a case inside a haulage firm unfolds one card at a time. Every pixel and every sound is generated in code. It plays in the browser, phone or desktop, with nothing to install. Beta.
Worth knowing
- There are no asset files of any kind: the art, the sound, the radio voice and the lettering are all produced by the program at run time.
- The graphics are drawing code rather than pictures. The city is generated from a seed, 5,200 world units square, and its static ground bakes into offscreen canvases while you drive; the cars, the lights and the weather are drawn each frame.
- The display face is not a font either. It is an original typeface drawn as outlines -- 26 capitals, 10 tabular figures and 37 marks, with no lowercase on purpose -- and every heading, number and stamp in the game is set in it.
- The headings are set in the game's own lettering, drawn in code rather than licensed, and packed into a single file of just over three kilobytes that this site serves itself. No font is loaded from anywhere else.
- Every sound is synthesised as it plays. The engine is a sawtooth stack through a lowpass that follows the revs; the siren sweeps on patrol and turns to yips inside two car lengths of a violator you have looked at; the music is procedural across five tracks that crossfade on the bar and vary over thirty-two.
- The radio voice is a formant synthesiser driven by a grapheme-to-phone mapper and a prosody model, pushed through a telephone band with a pressel click and a squelch tail. It is deliberately not intelligible, and every line it says is subtitled.
- A career is twenty-three nights, with twenty punning suspects and one case running underneath.
- The whole game is completable with one thumb on a phone.
- No account, no leaderboards, no cloud save: a career is kept in the browser on the device it was played on.
Captures
Every image is a capture of the built game at commit e789738, unretouched beyond crop and scale. The social card is a composite: a capture, the wordmark and the tagline. Tap a frame to see it full size without leaving the page; Download saves the file.
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Siren on, night street -
Crossing a junction, no interface -
Stopped between the blocks, lights on -
Filling station forecourt -
Night one, dusk wash -
Title screen -
The motor pool handover -
Roll call -
Patrol with the siren on -
The citation lands -
A runner, mid-chase -
Interview Room 2 -
A story card -
Fitting out the car -
Shift report, night ended by a debug command -
Late career, dawn wash -
Phone: title screen -
Phone: patrol, siren on -
Phone: the hero crop, readout and dispatch -
Phone: writing it up -
Phone: a runner -
Phone: the interview -
Phone: the motor pool -
Phone: the handover -
Phone: a story card -
Landscape, with a simulated cutout -
Social card, composite -
Siren on, the hero band -
Working the beat, wide -
A stop being written, wide -
Night one at dusk, wide -
Working the beat, portrait -
A stop on a phone, portrait -
Night one at dusk, portrait -
Siren on, the hero band at 1920
- Logo, vector 720x124
- Car 12, vector 244x244
Logo
The wordmark as SVG, and it is the game's own: the outlines are recorded straight out of the drawing code the title screen sets it with, so nothing here is a redrawing. Heavy condensed capitals, sheared forward, outer corners cut at forty-five degrees, under the patrol light bar.
Car 12 as SVG, recorded the same way out of the drawing code the title screen stands it under: the lamp, the car and the light bar's two washes on the ground.
The lettering itself is not offered as a file: it is drawn in the game's own code rather than licensed from a foundry. The wordmark above is the asset to use.
Contact
Every capture on this page is already at full size, so take what you need. For anything else, the account below is the way to reach the desk.
