#Starship
Fly the Gamesight rocket down an asteroid field for as long as you can. One life, no weapons, no power-ups. The field gets faster and denser the longer you last, so every run ends the same way eventually: the question is how far you get first.
#Controls
| Key | Does |
|---|---|
| ← or A | Steer left |
| → or D | Steer right |
| Space or R | Restart, once you've crashed |
That's the whole control scheme. You can't stop, shoot, or slow down, and there is no vertical movement: the ship sits near the bottom of the screen and you only choose where along that line to be.
Starship is keyboard-only, so it needs a physical keyboard to play.
#Scoring
Your score is time survived, at 10 points per second. Nothing else adds to it: no bonus for near misses, no multiplier for taking risks. A 30-second run scores 300, a full minute scores 600.
That makes the whole game one decision, repeated: take the safe gap or the tight one. The safe gap is always worth the same as the tight one.
Your best score is kept in the browser, and if you're signed in it also goes to the shared leaderboard at the end of every run. Signed out, the run still counts locally but nobody else sees it.
#How the field builds
Two things ramp with time, and both are continuous rather than stepped, so the difficulty creeps rather than jumping:
- Asteroids fall faster. Every asteroid picks its own speed, and the whole range shifts upward the longer the run goes.
- They arrive more often. Roughly one every 0.55 seconds at the start, tightening until they cap out at one every 0.12 seconds around the 43-second mark. After that the field is as dense as it gets, but it keeps accelerating.
Asteroids also vary in size, and a big one is exactly as fatal as a small one. Size only matters for how much room it denies you.
#Staying alive longer
- Sit in the middle by default. From the centre you can reach either side; from a corner you can only go one way, and a badly placed asteroid ends the run. Drift back to centre whenever the field gives you a moment.
- Look up, not down. By the time an asteroid is level with the ship your decision is already made. Read the row that's about a third of the way down and steer for the gap you want to be in.
- Commit early. The ship moves at a fixed speed, so a late decision is a slower crossing. Picking a gap early and holding the line beats correcting twice.
- The hitbox is kind. Collision is checked slightly inside the sprite, so contact that looks like a graze usually isn't one. Trust the near misses.
#Achievements
Starship is worth 1000 GS across twelve achievements. They split into three groups:
- Survival at 15, 30, 45 and 60 seconds. The 60-second one, Asteroid Ace, is the single biggest award in the game at 200 GS.
- Style: close shaves, ten close shaves in one run (Daredevil), crossing the full width of the field twenty times in one run (Pinball).
- Habit: your first run, twenty-five runs, beating your own best, and flying a run between midnight and 5am.
Two of them pull in opposite directions and can't be earned in the same run: Daredevil wants ten close shaves, and Untouchable wants thirty seconds with none at all. Go for them separately.
See scoring and achievements for exactly what triggers each one.