Space Rocks

I've been playing this game since I was a kid. The vector graphics. The heartbeat that speeds up as you clear the screen. That feeling when you're down to one tiny asteroid and it's screaming across the screen and you can't hit it. I wanted to feel that again. So I built it.

Everything is drawn with math. No sprites. No images. Just lines and dots. The asteroids are procedurally generated. Each one has a different jagged shape. They split when you shoot them. Big ones become medium. Medium ones become small. Small ones disappear. The physics wraps around the edges. Fly off the right side, you come back on the left.

Here's where I got carried away. I added CRT scanlines. Screen curvature. Chromatic aberration. That's the thing where the red, green, and blue channels separate a tiny bit at the edges. Makes it look like an old arcade monitor. Then I added screen shake when things explode. Then particle effects. Then a UFO that shows up and shoots at you. Then a high score table where you enter your initials. I was supposed to stop three features ago. I guess you could say the scope really... drifted. Anyway.

My favorite part is the attract mode. If you sit on the title screen and don't press anything, the game starts playing itself. I wrote a little autopilot that flies around and shoots asteroids. It's not great. It dies a lot. But it looks cool running on a screen in the background. I've left it on while doing dishes. More than once.