Asteroid Capitalist

About the game

Asteroid Capitalist is a top-down space shooter with a business joke at its heart. The solar system has run out of valuable minerals, and venture capitalists have sent every mining company out to the edge of the galaxy to find more. The hunt for profit has turned into a lawless war, and you are the sole solicitor of one of the companies, trying to survive the trip home. Your employer pays a bounty for every rival company ship you take out, and the score at the top of the screen is your pay.

You fly a small green ship in an endless field of drifting meteors. Rival ships come in waves, sometimes in a long chain that winds across the screen, and bigger ones show up later, including a large boss. You steer with the keyboard and aim with the mouse, and the ship fires toward the pointer. Lasers, collisions with meteors and enemy fire all cost you one of your lives, which are the little ships in the top left corner. Shields and power-ups drop from the wreckage and can turn a bad moment around. When you lose your last ship, the main menu shows how much you earned.

It was made by Sidaroth and Garlov in a two-person team for Open Jam 2019, whose theme was "The Future", with Phaser and a physics library. The graphics are from Kenney's free asset packs and the music is a CC0 track.

Playing it here

Click Play, then click the Play button on the title screen. Move with WASD or the arrow keys and aim with the mouse; the ship fires toward the pointer when you hold the mouse button. If you have a gamepad, plug it in before you start: the left stick steers and the right stick aims. The speaker icon in the bottom right corner turns the sound off. The game fits itself to the size of the frame.

Controls

Tips

Keep moving. The ship has inertia, so a few short bursts are better than holding a direction, and a moving target is harder for the rival ships to hit.

Shoot meteors only when they block you. They are in the way, but the bounty is in the ships.

Grab the drops. Shields and power-ups appear when something explodes, and they are worth a detour.

Use the whole screen. Staying in the middle lets the waves surround you; a position near one edge makes them come from one side.

FAQ

Is there an end? No, the game keeps going until you lose all your ships.

Does it have sound and music? Yes. Use the speaker icon to turn them off.

Can I play on a phone? No, it needs a keyboard and a mouse or a gamepad.

Is my score saved? The score of your last run is shown on the title screen, but nothing is stored between visits.

Credits and licence

Asteroid Capitalist was made by Sidaroth and Garlov and is released under the MIT licence. Most of the graphics and the font are from Kenney (Creative Commons CC0); the music, "Zombies March" by yd, and the other sound effects are CC0 as well, with an explosion sound by unfa credited in the game. The game was built from the authors' source; the changes made for this site are the removal of the developer panel (dat.gui) and the performance meter, a plain CSS file instead of SCSS, a small fix so that the Play button receives clicks when the window is smaller than the game's 1920x1080 size, and a rule that blocks any request to other sites. The source, the patch, the build script and the licence texts are linked from this page.