Space Rescue

About the game

You fly a tiny rescue ship, and you have exactly one control: the thruster. Hold Space and the ship climbs and drifts sideways; let go and it falls back down. Every time you release the key the ship turns to the other side, so the direction of the next burst is the opposite of the last one. Bouncing off the screen edges is part of the game.

Astronauts appear at random places in space, and flying into one rescues it and scores a point. But every so often a meteor appears too, and they never go away. The sky fills up slowly, the safe routes get narrow, and sooner or later you touch one: your ship explodes, and Enter starts a new rescue.

The whole game is one button and a rule you learn in ten seconds, and it is a good example of how much a single key can do. It was written by Takashi Kitao, the creator of the Pyxel engine, as one of the sample games for a book about making games with Pyxel, and it ships with Pyxel as an example app.

Playing it here

The first time you click Play the page downloads Pyxel and the Python runtime (about 15 MB), which takes a few seconds; after that the game shows a "click to start" prompt, and one more click starts it with sound. Nothing is loaded from other sites, and nothing is saved: the score is shown during the run and starts again from zero.

On the web we turned off the Esc key that closes the game on the desktop, because on a web page it would only freeze the screen. After an explosion the game goes back to the title, and Enter starts a new rescue.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Plan the side, not just the height. The next burst goes to the side opposite to the last one, so think about where the ship will be pushed before you press.

Short taps are gentle. A quick tap climbs a little and turns the ship around, which is useful in the tight spots between meteors.

The sky only gets fuller. Meteors stay, so collect astronauts near the edges of the screen while it is still roomy and avoid hanging around the middle.

Frequently asked questions

Is there an end? No. You play until you hit a meteor and try to beat your own score.

Is my score saved? No, the score is only shown during the run.

Does it work on a phone? The game was made for a keyboard or a game pad. The page offers an on-screen pad on touch devices, but we have not tested the game with it.

Why does it say "click to start"? Browsers only allow sound after you interact with the page, so the Pyxel launcher asks for one click before it starts the game.

Is it free? Yes: the game is under the MIT licence and the source of this build is available from this page.

Credits and licence

Space Rescue was made by Takashi Kitao, the creator of Pyxel, who also drew the art and wrote the sounds in the app's Pyxel resource file. It is distributed in the official Pyxel repository as an example app, with the header "license: MIT". The licence text and what we changed are in the licence file. The build served here changes a single line, turning off the Esc key that quits; the original app, the patch and the build scripts are hosted alongside the game.

It runs on the Pyxel engine (MIT) and the Pyodide runtime (MPL-2.0), whose licences and source are linked from the Licenses page.