Star Scramble

About the game

Star Scramble is a very small arcade game about greed and nerve. You steer a blue ball across a dark screen scattered with gold stars. Each star you roll over is one point. Four red balls are already moving when the round starts, each in a straight line, bouncing off the edges of the screen with a soft pluck, and every five seconds another one joins them. Touching any red ball ends the round at once.

New stars keep appearing in random places, so there is always something worth reaching, but the screen fills up with red balls quickly, and a star next to a wall is a lot more dangerous than one in the open. The counter at the top left shows your stars and the one at the top right the number of red balls on screen. When you are hit, the game-over panel shows the final score and lets you restart straight away or go back to the title screen.

The game is the companion project of Frederick Jacques Joubert's video tutorial series on the Bevy engine (Rust), which builds it step by step; its graphics and sounds come from Kenney's public-domain asset packs. The original is called "Bevy Ball Game", and the title used here is ours.

Playing it here

The game runs in the page. Click Click to play; the first start loads about 8 MB, then the title screen appears. Click Play: the round opens paused, with the Pause Menu on top, so you can get ready. Click Resume or press Space to start. Nothing is saved between rounds.

Controls

Tips

Watch the bounces. Red balls never change direction except at the edges, so you can read where each one will be a second from now. Wait in the middle and dart out when a lane clears.

Stay off the walls. Near the edges a red ball can come back at you after a bounce with almost no warning. Grab stars there quickly and head back to the open.

The clock is against you. Every five seconds there is one more red ball. Collect early, when the screen is still quiet.

Credits and licence

Star Scramble ("Bevy Ball Game") was written by Frederick Jacques Joubert and is released under the MIT License. The balls, the star and the sounds are from Kenney's Rolling Ball Assets, Sci-Fi Sounds and Interface Sounds packs (CC0, public domain), and the font is Fira Sans Bold (Mozilla Foundation and Telefonica S.A., SIL Open Font License 1.1). For the browser we changed the name on the title screen and removed the Quit buttons, which do nothing in a web page. The licence texts, those of the Rust libraries compiled into the game, the source and our changes are linked from this page.

FAQ

Nothing moves after I press Play. The round starts paused. Click Resume or press Space.

The keys do not work. Click on the game once so that the page has the keyboard focus.

Is there an end? No. The round lasts until a red ball touches you; the aim is to collect as many stars as you can before that.