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Hyperspace Garbage Collection
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About the game
Hyperspace Garbage Collection is a physics puzzle with a very silly premise. You are N4n, a robot that has run a garbage plant for seven thousand years. The plant takes both matter and antimatter, but one universe has dumped a load of antimatter "space-poop" through its warp hole ahead of schedule, the balance has gone wrong, and the loading dock is exploding. You are in manual mode, and your job is to get through the caverns of trash to the core of the plant.
The whole game is built on one rule: matter and antimatter destroy each other. Warp holes spit out pieces of trash, blue for matter and red for antimatter, and if a blue piece meets a red piece they annihilate. Your own robot is matter or antimatter too, and once a level lets you, you switch between the two with the Space key. At the end of each cavern there is a door that opens when you bring the right kind of trash to a trigger of the same colour. Lasers cross the rooms too: they cannot hurt you, but a laser destroys any piece of trash of its own colour, so you have to think about which side of the beam your cargo is on. And the trash does not last: every piece has a limited lifetime, so you cannot take your time.
The visuals are flat colours, glowing beams and soft explosions, with a slowly moving background, and the camera glides along with the robot. Besides the warp holes and lasers, the caverns have tractor beams that push anything that floats into them, and doors that stay shut until their trigger is satisfied. It is a short game, four levels, and the first one is a quiet warm-up where you only learn to move.
Playing it here
Click Play, click START on the title and then click once inside the game so it receives the keyboard. The game pauses when it loses focus (for example if you click outside it) and carries on when you click back. The gear in the bottom right corner opens a list of effects (background, explosions, glow, gradients, trail) that you can turn off if the game runs slowly on your device. Nothing is saved between visits.
Controls
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| arrow keys or WASD | move the robot |
| Space | switch between matter (blue) and antimatter (red), where a level allows it |
| matter / antimatter button (below the game) | the same, with the mouse or a finger |
| drag a finger (touch) | move the robot |
| gear | turn visual effects on and off |
A few things worth knowing
Match the colours. A trigger of one colour wants trash of that same colour, so bring it the right kind.
Lasers destroy trash, not you. A laser wipes out any piece of its own colour, so keep your cargo away from beams of that colour.
Watch the clock. Pieces fade away after a while, so do not carry an old one across the whole room when a fresh one is on its way.
Credits and licence
Hyperspace Garbage Collection was made by razh for GitHub Game Off 2013, where it placed second. The game is released under the MIT licence. It includes the Box2dWeb physics library (zlib licence), the RequireJS loader and its text plugin (MIT or BSD licence). The one sound effect that came with the original, played when a trigger opens, had no stated author or licence, so this site replaces it with a short chime generated for this page. The licence texts are linked from this page.