Q1K3

What it's like to play

Q1K3 is a first-person shooter built for js13k 2021, the contest where the entire game must fit in 13 kilobytes. It opens in a corridor, a shotgun model held across the bottom of the view, and the WebGL canvas renders at 320 by 180 before the browser scales it up with pixelated filtering. Chunky edges are the point, not a bug.

Movement is WASD or the arrow keys, left mouse fires, Space or right mouse jumps, and Q, E or the wheel swap weapons. There are three: a shotgun with unlimited shells and eight pellets per blast on a 0.9-second cycle, a nailgun holding 100 nails at 0.09 seconds between shots, and a grenade launcher with ten rounds that reload in 0.65 seconds. Health starts at 100 and sits bottom-left beside the ammo count. Five enemy types share line-of-sight checks but no pathfinding, so a doorway becomes a choke point you can hold.

Two levels is the whole campaign. There is no save, no difficulty setting, no gamepad support and no way to rebind keys. Enemies snag on corners when they lose sight of you, and grenades bounce before exploding for up to 120 damage, which is hard to judge on a 320-pixel-wide buffer. On a large monitor the upscaled buffer turns distant targets into a few pixels, and mouse look needs pointer lock, so it is a desktop game.

Verdict: None of that undoes the achievement. Every texture is generated at load, the lighting is dynamic, the doors open on cue, and the shooting still feels weighty. Play it as a tight fifteen-minute lesson in how far restraint can carry a design.

Controls

WASD or arrow keys move, left mouse fires, space or right mouse jumps, Q/E or the wheel switch weapons.