HEXES

About the game

HEXES mixes an arcade shooter with mental arithmetic. Your little ship flies in a circle around a large orange hexagon that holds a number. At the start of each stage the game tells you the number you need, and the clock starts running.

The hexagon fights back by throwing things at you. Some of them are useful: digits from 1 to F and the four operators, plus, minus, times and divide. Shoot a digit and an operator to keep them, then apply them to the hexagon to change its value. Others are enemies, circles, squares, triangles that change course and diamonds that shoot back. Getting hit costs you thirty seconds; destroying an enemy gives you some time back.

All numbers are in hexadecimal, as the name suggests: $0A is 10, $92 is 146 and the largest value is $FF, 255. Go past it and the count wraps around to $00, and going below zero wraps back up to the top. Reach the target and the next stage begins, with a new number and busier enemies.

Playing it here

This is a homebrew game made for the Game Boy Advance: a new game by independent developers, not a commercial release. It was made for the GBA Jam 2022, and this is the jam version, a short demo of four stages. It runs here in the mGBA emulator. Click Play now and press Enter on the title screen.

Your score is based on the time left on the clock when you clear each stage, and the high score is kept in the cartridge save, which stays in this browser. F2 also saves the state of the emulator at any moment and F4 brings it back. A gamepad works too.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

You need both pieces. Pressing Z only works when you hold a digit and an operator. The slots keep the last ones you shot, so you can pick off a better digit before you commit.

Think before you multiply. Multiplying gets you far quickly, but it is easy to overshoot and wrap around. Division always rounds down, which makes it handy for small corrections.

Watch the clock, not just the maths. Every hit takes thirty seconds, and the time left at the end of a stage makes your score, so it often pays to clear the enemies first and calculate afterwards.

Credits and licence

HEXES was created by Eigenlight Arts: programming and art by Dania Rifki (Kaleidosium), music and sound effects by Kathryn Hathaway (Kathound). It is free software under the MIT licence and is built with Natu, a Nim library for the Game Boy Advance by Jeremy Clarke (exelotl) under the zlib licence, which includes libtonc and the maxmod sound library. The shot digits use a font derived from Squarewave by Jeti, under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. The licence texts are linked from this page.