ShadeGunner — Android (Godot 4)

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A 16-color cyberpunk side-scroller set in the Blade Runner universe. As a Blade Runner you work your way from the outskirts to the Tyrell HQ, and you have to spot, scan and deactivate replicants among the passers-by – and live with the consequences of your decisions.

This is the Android / handheld version of ShadeGunner: a faithful re-implementation in Godot 4 / GDScript, not an emulator wrapper. Same simulation, same city, same look – the procedural scene composed into 640×360, Bayer-dithered against a 16-color palette and pushed through the CRT chain (curvature, scanlines, shadow mask, bloom, phosphor persistence). Playable with touch, gamepad (e.g. Retroid Pocket) or keyboard, on any screen shape from 10:9 (Retroid Pocket Classic) to ~22:9. UI and in-game text in German and English.

Download: the signed APK (arm64, Android 7+) is on the Releases page.

Screenshots

Phone (20:9, touch)	Handheld (4:3, touch)

Atmosphere first

The game is meant to be played calmly: walk through the city, take it in, have a few moments that feel like the film. The mechanics serve the mood – and the further you get, the denser and less readable the streets become, until the question is no longer who is a replicant but whether it matters.

• Own palette per quarter: every zone has its own 16 colors built around one complementary pair plus a few close shades for highlights on the figures (outskirts amber ↔ blue/violet, suburbs green/cyan ↔ pink, downtown teal ↔ signal red, harbor ash blue ↔ sodium, Tyrell gold ↔ deep blue).
• Dense streets: old ornate facades with retrofitted cables next to hyper-modern blocks, chalk-graffiti monoliths and ornamented columns, wrecks and trash in the outskirts (cleaner further in), bridges and overhanging buildings you walk underneath, pedestrian signal towers as free-standing objects (some right in front of the camera, slightly out of focus), cables strung across the street (single or in bundles), thin out-of-focus cables and lamps in the foreground, paper litter swirling in gusts, cyclists in small groups as pure scenery, a 60s sedan among the modern traffic, paper umbrellas with glowing shafts.
• CRT phosphor: near-white highlights smear a little longer, and fading trails get softer as they decay.

Core loop

Observe → pick a target → scan (limited charges) → tell confidence (Naive Bayes, calibrated against the zone's real replicant ratio) → aim/shoot (passers-by in the line of fire catch the bullet) → meet the quota, the exit opens → 1 of 3 upgrades. Killing civilians ⇒ suspicion (at 100 % the run is lost).

When you catch an eye reflex – by watching, scanning, under a police searchlight or in a blackout – the game's emblem (an eye in the scanner reticle) flashes up above that person. It marks the tell, not the truth: humans occasionally show a false reflex too.

• Zones: Outskirts → Suburbs → Downtown → Harbor → Tyrell.
• Variety: jumping (over barriers, barrels and bins – not over wrecks or parked cars – and dodging blows), traffic on two lanes, police searchlight (reveals eye reflexes), blackouts, bounty replicants, landing police spinners (the downdraft pushes everyone aside, then a ground check with a searchlight; the spinner blocks the median), Gaff's origami (one figure per zone: chicken, matchstick man, sheep, crane, unicorn; finding one = points + scanner refilled) and noodle bars in the White Dragon style (counter, patrons, cook, neon dragon; standing at the counter briefly refills one heart).
• Full streets – and everyone is part of the simulation: passers-by on the road, strollers on the rear sidewalk in front of the shops, and groups standing around talking. All of them can be observed and scanned; replicants hide in every kind. Difficulty EASY/NORMAL/HARD scales the crowd.
• Addressing and shouting (V): a short tap addresses the target ("You there! Stand still!"): humans raise their hands and answer, whoever has the STIMULUS tell just stares. Holding charges a shout to the crowd; on release, "LAPD! Everyone down!" rolls across the street as a visible wave, and each person reacts with their own moment of shock as it reaches them. Whoever has the STIMULUS tell stays motionless; the others take cover (the bullet passes over anyone crouching) or run. Every shout raises the street's unrest: more people run, replicants get nervous and bolt.
• No two vehicles look alike: body colors, accent colors (trim lines, two-tone roofs, skirts, racing stripes), underglow, brightness and lettering (Tyrell, Shimata, Pan Am, Off-World, Nexus 6, Eye Works …) are combined per vehicle – taxi roof signs, bus ad banners, bus route (e.g. "12 HADES") and truck lettering are random too. 32 variants per type.
• Traffic turns into a column: every quarter has more vehicles – and the denser the traffic, the slower it flows: stop-and-go, halted taxis, jam horns, usually 5–7 vehicles on screen downtown. And the slower and fuller it is, the quieter the engines. If you stand in a lane the driver honks and brakes – you only get run over if you dart in front of a car at the last second (truly dangerous up front, barely so in dense downtown traffic). Walk into a car from the side and you only get a brief bump (stun), no heart lost. Along the curb cars, taxis and trucks park (some with hazard lights); they are too tall to jump over and hide whoever is standing behind them.
• Steaming manholes: like in New York – manhole covers glowing in the crack and striped steam stacks that puff in bursts. In the steam you can barely see anything: whoever stands there is hard to observe.
• Own music per quarter: the outskirts with the title theme, then denser with each zone (arpeggios, choir, foghorn and harbor metal, Tyrell big and bright). Plus a beat-locked rhythm track – from a heartbeat in the suburbs to a driving sequencer in Tyrell – that grows louder with tension (aiming, unrest, flight, suspicion, ROY) and slowly fades again.
• Holographic ballerinas (Blade Runner 2049): giant dancers above the roofs and small ones on projector pedestals on the sidewalk – pirouette, seconde, arabesque with promenade, scanlines, dropouts, glitches; they go dark during a blackout.
• Syd Mead traffic: police spinner with a capsule cockpit and wheel pods, Deckard's sedan, metro-cab with a glass dome, Sebastian's armadillo truck, aerial limousine, a city bus full of passengers, a motorcycle with disc wheels.
• Finale: Tyrell is a long last sector. Toward the end the city empties – derelict blocks, shutters, ornate columns – until J. F. Sebastian's house (the Bradbury). ROY stands in front of it and waits until you come close. In the fight he only taunts you with lines from the film. Once he has beaten you down to one heart he lets go and stands defenseless: one shot is enough. If you don't shoot, he speaks – tears in rain – dies on his own, and a dove rises. The ending reflects which way you chose. The exit only opens once the quota is met and ROY is no longer standing.

Controls

Touch	Gamepad	Keyboard	Action
stick (left)	D-pad / left stick	A/D, W/S, arrows	walk, depth (near/far)
tap a person	L1	Q / Tab	cycle target
SCAN	X	R	scan selected target
AIM (hold, release)	R1 or R2 (hold, release)	E (hold, release)	aim, fire
CANCEL	B	C	lower weapon
SHOUT (tap / hold)	Y	V	address target / shout "LAPD! Everyone down!"
JUMP	A	Space	jump
–	L2	Shift	sprint
PAUSE	Start	P / Esc	pause (menus: settings, help)

Menus work with touch (tap rows and cards), D-pad + A, or arrow keys + Enter. The Android back gesture pauses. Touch controls: AUTO (shown on touch screens), ON or OFF.

Settings and performance

The scene is composed on the CPU like in the original, so the frame rate depends on the device. Settings let you trade effects for frames:

• Quality HIGH / MEDIUM (default on Android: no reflections) / LOW sets reflections, rain (heavy/light/off), fog and FX in one go; each can then be toggled on its own. On a handheld start with LOW.
• Aspect ratio AUTO: the internal width adapts to the screen (height 360, width 400–960) – no letterbox and no cropping, same scale on every device.
• Display CRT or TEXT (the scene as ASCII characters in the palette colors, still through the CRT chain), scanlines, music/effects volume, difficulty, language.

Port notes

• 1:1 with the Python original: constants and tables are exported from the Python modules (tools/export_data.py); the simulation is step-for-step identical (tests/test_sim_parity.gd replays 25 517 steps against a trace of the original: 0 deviations), Python's random is reproduced bit-exactly (src/core/pyrandom.gd), and QPainter is re-built on Godot's RenderingServer (src/core/qp.gd). HUD, sound calls, sprites, vehicles, city layers and the full scene are pixel-compared against the original (tools/*_reference.py).
• Own palette per zone is passed to the dither shader as a uniform; the HUD keeps noir16.
• Port-specific speed-ups: wet-street reflections are drawn by a shader instead of baking a blurred image per sprite frame, radial gradients use a cached 2D texture, the perspective ground and reflection bands are single draw calls.
• Gamepad on a handheld: digital shoulder buttons report a button, not an analog trigger axis, and Godot has no JOY_BUTTON_L2/R2 constants - that is why aim/fire sits on R1 (the R2 axis works as well). --joydebug prints every gamepad button/axis index if a button ever seems unresponsive.
• Test cheat (keyboard): type giveall anywhere (immortal, exit always open); giveall1–giveall5 jumps straight into sector 1–5.

Build

godot --path . --rendering-driver opengl3            # run on desktop
godot --headless --path . --export-release "Android" build/shadegunner.apk

Needs the Godot 4 export templates, JDK 17 and the Android SDK. export_presets.cfg is not in the repo (it holds the signing setup) – start from export_presets.cfg.example. Tests: godot --headless --path . --script res://tests/test_sim.gd (and the other scripts in tests/).

License

MIT. An independent fan project; Blade Runner is a trademark of its owners.