Spaceships (Reverse Asteroid) | Hacker News Reader

Spaceships (Reverse Asteroid)

spaceships.treybastian.com

389 pointszdw70 comments

unlike regular asteroids where you can keep track of your ship bc you only have to follow one object around the screen and you control it it seems like the hardest part of this game is finding the ships. esp. when they star to be multiple shapes. it would lightly break the vibe but making the ships a different color would help a lot.

Second that. Colors is a requirement. Yet I loved the concept.

I preferred it without colour, half of the fun is finding the ships, like a where's wally/waldo

At least one of the ships is shaped very close to the smallest asteroids making it very hard to track.

It's especially bad that they can hide behind the UI sometimes...

Fun for about 5 minutes but screeches to a halt when ships start to teleport. Only takes a few minutes to be able to get to wave 12 and then there's no progress after that.

Yeah, the teleporting was an exceedingly annoying and un-fun mechanic. In games, players don't like when something happens without warning and are unable to react to it. This is why we have telegraphing. Dev, if you want to keep the mechanic, give it a charge up time and an indicator of the impending direction of a warp. Otherwise, funny idea for a game.

I agree that the idea that some number of teleporting ships scales past the ability to bring enough chaotic asteroids to bear on them seems like a design problem. For me, that was six ships on wave 14. The field is rapidly emptied of threats.

Nice. This makes me want to play a number of games as the bad guy.

agree there are probably a bunch that would be fun. packman, play as a ghost and need to multi task to get all the ghosts in a spot to trap pacman

donkey kong, play as donkey and try to time barrel throws to hit mario

galaga, play as the fleet, control left right of the whole fleet and have the 3-4 different "attacks" you could send out.

Nintendo and Namco made a multiplayer Pac-Man for GameCube where three players play as ghosts on Game Boy Advances and can see the whole map, while one player plays as Pac-Man with a limited view.

Mr. Don’t? “Centimpede”

Space invaders but you’re the invaders would be fun. And I have to assume it’s already been done.

On a different note, Rampage was a great game where you’re the bad guy. I had a blast playing this as a kid.

Yes, like Destroy All Humans, Alien Hominid... Not arcades, though.

I created a reverse Space Invaders a few months ago, but I struggled to get it to be a fun game as you just move left and right avoiding the players bullets. (I'd post a gif, but it looks exactly like Space Invaders to watch).

The Wizard of Yendor.

Rogue Like Celebration is _now_. Great video coverage on YouTube

You likely know this but in case not: Dungeon Keeper series.

Sim City: you're the disasters.

Sim City was already a "you are the bad guys" game!

The creator of Sim City was working on a game called Raid on Bungeling Bay" [1] where your job was to bomb a fully functional civilization into the stone age. He had so much fun developing the civilization that he decided to make a game of it.

So maybe we just need a "Raid on Bungling Bay Redux: Massacre of The Sims".

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_on_Bungeling_Bay

> Creative Computing in 1984 said that the game "push[es] the animation capabilities of the Commodore 64 to their very limits". The magazine concluded that it would become "one of the all-time great computer games".

Gaming journalism didn't only recently become ridiculous, it turns out.

There's still plenty of time for a successor!

Smooth full-screen scrolling on the c64 was hard. In the years since 1984 people discovered ways to use unintended behavior in the c64's video chips to move a lot more of the screen around seamlessly, but ROBB's fast omnidirectional scrolling was pretty slick for a game from the same year the c64 came out.

Raid Over Bungelling Bay grew into Sim City, which had remakes over two decades and spawned an entire genre of "city builders", I think there is indeed an argument that it became an "all-time great".

CARRION - a reverse horror game

https://store.steampowered.com/app/953490/CARRION/

DRM free (and cheaper) on GOG https://www.gog.com/en/game/carrion

I second (from another comment) the suggestion for CARRION. Think of it like those 80’s movies where an amorphous creature is captured/created and stuck in a lab. You play as the creature, trying to get out.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/953490/CARRION/

Also, not exactly playing as the bad guy but Enemy Mind is a fun tangential concept where instead of having your own ammo and life, you’re constantly possessing enemy ships and using their resources, before discarding them for the next one.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/285840/Enemy_Mind/

Coincidentally it’s now with 60% discount and it’s worth it at that price. If I recall (it’s been many years since I played it) the game was short and didn’t have a lot going for it outside the gimmick.

In board games there's "kill doctor lucky" which is reverse cluedo/clue.

Crawl is a great one. Rouguelike where when you die you inhabit the dungeon.

May I suggest removing/rephrashing the "you are not the ship" subtitle. It's obvious AI "this button is not red" phrasing that cheapens it a bit.

"Are you not Asleep?" is the one question AI cannot answer

I disagree. The subtitle was half the fun for me.

And this is why we'll have to live with AI slop for the next decade

https://www.npmjs.com/package/@harvis/asteroids

for those who want to have easter egg on their pet projects with konami cheat code

Here's another great interpretation of "reverse Asteroids" from the JS13K comp in 2015: https://js13kgames.com/games/behind-asteroids-the-dark-side (Hi greweb!)

That was so much fun!

Its a fun game! The only thing I would add is the ability to see the players cry and lose their quarters after you smash their ship.

Neat game! I managed to get to level 11 but got beat up.

There can be a set of really cool things one can do with Asteroids. Some years ago I made a game which is a mix of Asteroids+Bomberman+Pacman.

https://kenamick.itch.io/spaceghost-cga

So I got a really high score before I signed in, only signed in afterwards, and now, even though my high score displays on the "best wave" display for me, it's nowhere on the global high score board. I'm just going to have to, like, get it again somehow?? That's annoying.

I made a planet-defending game back in 2018. Didn't realize that it actually mimicks Asteroid

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ru.ivanludvig....

One of the most frustrating things about mobile gaming is that you can't just release a game, you have to commit to keeping it updated for the rest of your life or else accept that in 2-3 years nobody will be able to play it.

The controls/rules are pretty unclear. This thing could use a controls/rules option.

game is sideways on my portrait monitor!

Had an actual fun for about 5 minutes, thank you! Good casual game!

Great Game! I think we'd all have an easier time with color added, which is why this game is challenging in a good way. Side-note: I beat 9th place globally! Let's go.

Fun twist on the game!

I didn't play for too long, but I just clicked between the ship and asteroids and near-instantly destroyed it, quickly passing the waves I played.

Is there difficulty ramp later on?

The number of ships increases, and then the speed, and then the accuracy with which they fire. The gravity generator seems slower to recharge, and the asteroids are slower to generate, or that may be subjective.

Around wave ten, I think the ships can teleport.

Different ships that can survive and bounce on slower or glancing hits, shields, more maneuverable saucer ships. Wave fifteen the ships reload and fire really rapidly, decimated a crowded field in seconds.

yes

Since not all asteroids are pulled to the gravity simultaneously, some kind of background starfield could make it clearer that the camera/viewport is moving.

Very fun! I sucks playing asteroids, here I am an Ace!

I did a "Asteroid as an FPS" a couple months ago, play it here: https://linsomniac.github.io/roidbelt/

it's beautiful, well done!

Thanks!

That’s really cool! Neat cross of the old tank game with the wireframe graphics and asteroids!

Batttlezone was the tank game.

man, I loved that game.

I also did that one: https://linsomniac.github.io/tankzone/

The silly part is that you end up just looking at the radar and playing regular Asteroid anyway

The whole reason I made it was that the "top down" view never really clicked for me, so when I'm playing it I almost never look at it.

While we're at it, I also did Tempest: https://linsomniac.github.io/teapot/

The game is pretty confusing i still do not understand how to play this the right way a guide there would make it good.

Oh this is a fun game! Just keep moving the asteroids non-stop, that way you can catch them when they spawn

Neat. Got to level 10 before there were too many ships firing and teleporting.

Really awesome this makes me want to play old school games

Nicely done. Took a minute to figure out.

Feature request: support LRUD.

Kind of fun.

oh i really like this idea. very cool

now go make "Bowser: Kidnap the Princess"

Thanks!

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