Badlands Royale

How to play Badlands Royale

1. Press Drop In. You start near the middle of the map with a Revolver, two sticks of dynamite and 140 health. Twenty-nine computer-controlled gunslingers start spread around the outside.
2. Loot. Chests sit in the towns and hideouts and are scattered across the open desert. Stand next to one and press E — it holds a weapon, health or dynamite.
3. Fight. Move with WASD, aim with the mouse and click to shoot. R reloads, and the gun reloads by itself when it runs dry. Hold Shift to sprint, which drains stamina.
4. Ride. Press E next to a horse to mount it and E again to get off. On horseback you cover ground far faster and never tire — but you cannot shoot, reload or throw dynamite until you dismount.
5. Stay inside the ring. The Dust Devil storm closes in eight stages. Outside it you lose health every second, and the damage climbs with each stage.
6. Throw dynamite with G. It flies the way you are aiming and goes off 1.6 seconds later.
7. Be the last one standing. Your rivals fight each other as well as you. The result screen shows your placement out of 30, your kills and how long you lasted.

Controls

On a phone the game plays in landscape. The ⛶ button switches fullscreen on and off, and 🔊 opens music and sound sliders plus a controller-rumble switch.

Weapons and tiers

Every weapon also comes in three tiers. Tier 2 (blue ring) does 28% more damage and tier 3 (gold ring) does 60% more, and each tier adds one round. The guns are ranked Revolver, Sawed-Off, Shotgun, Rifle, with tier only breaking ties — so any Rifle outranks any Shotgun. You only ever swap up: a weapon that would not be an upgrade is turned into 20 health instead.

Loot, horses and dynamite

• Chests: six in ten hold a weapon. The rest hold either 55 health or two sticks of dynamite.
• Fallen gunslingers often drop the gun they were carrying, and sometimes a health pack (+35) or a stick of dynamite. Walk over loot to pick it up. Your rivals collect health and better guns too.
• Horses wander the map. On foot you move at 180 units a second, or 300 while sprinting; mounted it is 300, or 430 at a gallop, and your stamina refills while you ride.
• Dynamite does up to 70 damage at the centre of the blast, fading to nothing at the edge. You can carry six sticks. Your own dynamite hurts you too, at half strength — throw it, then move.

The Dust Devil storm

The safe ring shrinks in stages. Each stage lasts 20 seconds: the ring holds still for the first 9, then closes in over the next 11, drifting toward a new centre as it goes. The numbers below are the ring's radius as a share of the map's width, and the damage you take each second while outside it.

The ring reaches stage 8 two minutes and twenty seconds after you drop in, and at that point nowhere is safe — so a match is always settled within about two and a half minutes.

Tips & strategy

• Travel mounted, fight on foot. A horse is the fastest way to reach loot or outrun the ring, but you are defenceless in the saddle. Get off before you are in range of anyone.
• Open every chest you pass. Even when the gun inside is no upgrade, you get 20 health for it, and four chests in ten are health or dynamite anyway.
• Match the gun to the ground. The Rifle wins in open desert, where its range and accuracy count. The Sawed-Off and Shotgun win inside towns, where fights happen around corners.
• Let them thin each other out. Everyone is against everyone. Arriving late to a gunfight and dealing with the wounded survivor is cheaper than starting it.
• Finish what you start. A badly hurt rival breaks off and goes looking for health. If you let them leave, you will meet them again at full strength.
• Respect the late storm. One or two damage a second is a nuisance; thirteen or more kills you in seconds. Move early once the ring is past its halfway stage.

How it's built

Badlands Royale is one JavaScript file drawing to an HTML canvas. The map, characters, horses and buildings are all drawn in code and the sound is synthesized with the Web Audio API, so there are no image or audio files to download. Your 29 rivals are simulated in your browser — it is a single-player game, and no connection is needed once the page has loaded. Nothing about a match is sent anywhere: there is no account, leaderboard or database. A shared result carries its placement, kills and time inside the link and the image. The only thing kept on your device is your volume and rumble preference.

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