Open Star Fighter

About the game

Open Star Fighter puts you in the cockpit of a small star fighter in deep space, among slowly turning asteroids and a sky full of stars. It has two ways to play.

In Team Death Match you fly for the blue team against the red team. Both sides are full of computer pilots who chase, dodge and shoot just like you, and destroyed ships come back after a short wait. Each team has a bar at the top of the screen that drops with every loss; the first team to destroy 30 enemy ships wins the match.

In Hoop Race there is no one to shoot. A course of 35 glowing hoops winds through space, and you fly through every one of them as fast as you can. A counter shows how many you have left and a clock runs until the last one.

The flying is arcade-style but fully three-dimensional. The mouse points the nose of the ship, A and D roll it, and W lights the afterburner for a burst of speed. You carry two weapons: rapid blasters, and missiles that lock on to an enemy whose shield is down and who is within 400 metres. The HUD marks every ship, shows where to aim to hit a moving target, and points at ships that are off the screen.

The ships are chunky low-poly models in bright colours, the backdrop is a deep star field, and the sound is simple and punchy. The author made it as an open, playable starting point for other space games, and it is a complete little game in itself.

Playing it here

Click Play and wait for the page to load (about 60 MB, downloaded only when you press the button; it is a 3D game, so a recent computer works best). Pick a mode in the menu (the title screen calls the game Open Space Fighter). When the match starts, click inside the game so it can take the mouse pointer. Esc gives the mouse back to the browser; press it again to open the pause menu, where you can restart or go back to the main menu.

The web version uses Godot's Compatibility renderer, so the lighting is simpler than in the desktop version, and the Quit button is hidden, since a browser page cannot close itself.

Controls

With a gamepad: left stick to steer, right stick to roll, right trigger for the afterburner, A to shoot, Y to switch weapons, X to track a ship, d-pad up to switch the view.

Tips

Lead your shots. A small marker in front of each enemy shows where to shoot to hit it while it moves. Aim there, not at the ship.

Use missiles on bare ships. A missile only locks on when the enemy's shield is down. Wear the shield off with the blasters, then switch and fire.

Roll into turns. Rolling with A or D and then pulling the nose up turns the ship much faster than yawing alone.

Save the afterburner for the race. In Hoop Race it is what wins time; in a dogfight it is a way out when someone is on your tail.

FAQ

Is anything saved? No. Each match starts fresh.

Does it work on a phone? No. It needs a mouse and a keyboard, or a gamepad.

Is it really free to share? Yes. The code is MIT and the assets are CC0, as the author states, and the font is under the SIL Open Font License.

Credits and licence

Open Star Fighter was made by thelastflapjack (teeeece on itch.io) with Godot, Blender, Inkscape, Krita and Audacity. Code under the MIT License; assets under Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal.

• Space ship models originally by Quaternius, CC0, edited by the author.
• Font Orbitron by The Orbitron Project Authors (Matt McInerney), SIL Open Font License 1.1.
• It runs on Godot Engine 4.5.1 (MIT).

For this site the Quit button was hidden and the audio buses were pointed at the master bus (the original setting crashed the web version at start; it sounds the same). The licence texts, the notices of the libraries inside the Godot engine and the source of this build are linked from this page.