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Gatemender
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About the game
A warp gate hangs in the dark, and its ring is full of broken pieces. You are the repair ship. The sky around it is full of asteroids, and the only thing between you and a fixed gate is a lot of floating rock.
Gatemender plays like Asteroids at first: you turn, thrust and shoot, and the big rocks split into smaller ones. The twist is what the rocks leave behind. Each one drops colored scraps, and every broken piece of the gate shows a glowing outline in the color it needs and a number: how many scraps of that color it takes to fix it. You collect what you need, park the ship over the damaged part and hold the repair key until it clicks into place. When the whole ring is whole again the vortex opens, and you fly in to reach the next gate, where the rocks come faster and in larger numbers.
You have a hull meter, a few spare ships and a burst weapon that charges up as you fly. There is no ending besides the one where the last ship breaks, so the point is the score.
Playing it here
The first time you click Play the page downloads the Python runtime and the pygame library (about 23 MB), which takes a few seconds; after that a "click to start" message appears, and one more click starts the game with sound. The download is kept by your browser, so every other pygame game on the site opens faster. Nothing is loaded from other sites. The game has no save: every run starts from the first gate.
Controls
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| W | thrust |
| S | brake |
| A / D | turn left / right |
| Space | shoot |
| E | repair (hold it while the ship sits over a broken part) |
| K | burst |
Tips
Collect before you repair. A broken part tells you which color it needs and how many scraps. There is no use parking over it with empty pockets, so shoot rocks of the right kind first.
Brake early. The ship keeps drifting after you let go of thrust, and a rock that is only a little too close is already a hit. Tap S well before you need to stop.
Small rocks hurt as much as big ones. Shooting a big rock turns it into several fast small ones, so clear the area around the gate before you settle in to repair.
Frequently asked questions
Does it save my progress? No. A run always starts from the first gate.
Does it work on a phone? It needs a keyboard, so it is meant for a computer.
Why does the first start take a while? The page loads Python and the game libraries. Your browser keeps them, so the next visit starts much faster.
Is it free? Yes. The game is free software: the code is MIT and the art and sound are Creative Commons.
Credits and licence
Gatemender was made by Erik Letson for the December 2020 Librejam, a jam for free software games. The code is released under the MIT/Expat licence; the images and sounds are under CC BY-SA 4.0 International. The sound effects and music (.ogg files) are CC0, derived from assets by Juhani Junkala / SubSpaceAudio. The font, Computer Speak v0.3 by Mcguy215, is licensed under CC BY 3.0 (https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/1436469). The version served here changes only the main loop (the browser needs it to be asynchronous); the change and the source are linked from the Licenses page. The game runs on pygame-ce (LGPL-2.1) and CPython, whose licences and source are also linked from the Licenses page.