Kataster

About the game

Kataster is a minimalist space shooter on a single screen. Your small red ship floats in the middle of a deep, slowly moving starfield, and brown rocks drift in from the sides. You do not steer the ship like a car: you turn it on the spot and fire the engine, and it keeps gliding in the direction it was pushed until you push it another way. Anything that leaves one edge of the screen comes back on the opposite side, the ship, the rocks and your shots alike.

Shooting a big rock breaks it into medium ones, a medium rock breaks into small ones, and small rocks are destroyed. Big rocks are worth 40 points, medium 20 and small 10; the score sits at the top right and your remaining ships at the top left. A hit costs one ship, and you get a moment of invulnerability, shown by the ship blinking, before the rocks can hurt you again. New rocks keep arriving, so the screen never stays empty for long. When the last ship is gone, the Game Over menu takes you back to the title.

Kataster was written by Boris Boutillier in Rust with the Bevy engine, as a compact example of a complete game (menus, pause, physics, a shader background) for people learning the engine, and has been kept up to date with new Bevy versions. The art, fonts and sounds come from Kenney's Space Shooter Redux pack, and the starfield is a shader inspired by Pablo Roman Andrioli's "Star Nest".

Playing it here

The game runs in the page and is played with the keyboard. Click Click to play; the first start loads about 15 MB, then the title screen appears. Choose Play with the arrow keys and press Enter. The animated background is drawn by the graphics card, so on a slow computer the game may run less smoothly. Nothing is saved.

Controls

Tips

Short bursts of thrust. The ship keeps its speed, and there is no brake. Tap the engine, then turn and fire; to stop, turn around and thrust the other way.

Break rocks one at a time. Every big rock becomes several smaller, faster pieces. Finish off the fragments of one rock before you crack the next.

Use the wrap-around. Shots that leave the screen come back on the other side, and so do rocks. Keep an eye on the edges behind you as well as in front.

Credits and licence

Kataster was made by Boris Boutillier and is released under the MIT License or the Apache License 2.0, at your option. The ships, rocks, lasers, explosions, the title font and the sounds are from Kenney's Space Shooter Redux and Smoke Particle packs (CC0, public domain); the menu font is Fira Sans (Mozilla Foundation and Telefonica S.A., SIL Open Font License 1.1); the background shader is inspired by "Star Nest" by Pablo Roman Andrioli (MIT). For the browser we removed the Exit entries from the menus, left out a debugging add-on that does not work in a web page and made two small compatibility fixes for WebGL. The licence texts, those of the Rust libraries compiled into the game, the source and our changes are linked from this page.

FAQ

The ship does not respond. Click on the game once so that the page has the keyboard focus. In the title menu, press Enter on Play.

How do I stop the ship? There is no brake: turn to face the other way and thrust until you slow down.

Why are there no engine flames? The original draws them with a particle library that needs features browsers do not offer yet, and the author leaves them out of the web version too.