Stardust

Grow from a speck of dust into a black hole

Live a whole star's life

Dust cloud. Gas nebula. Protostar. Yellow star. Blue giant. Hypergiant. Every new form is bigger and heavier, and the world falls into you faster.

Every star dies

Hydrogen is your lifetime. When it burns out, your star collapses, and your mass decides into what: a cold cloud, a brown dwarf, a white dwarf, a neutron star... or a black hole. Spend the stardust you earned on upgrades and start a new Big Bang.

No enemies and no way to lose. The only question is how big you get.

How to play

• Mouse or finger — the star follows the pointer
• WASD / arrow keys also work
• Turn the sound on: the music is synthesized live in code

Made for Ludum Dare 60

Made solo for the Compo. TypeScript on a bare canvas with WebGL shaders, no engine, about 3 MB.

AI usage and how it was made

made solo in 48 hours, from scratch, no engine: plain webgl, typescript and webaudio. one person, one weekend.

what ai did and what i did:

• code: written with ai coding assistants. the design, the systems, the tuning and every decision about how the game plays are mine, the assistants typed a lot of it
• graphics: base textures were generated, then reworked in shaders, layered, composited and animated by hand. what you see in the game is the result of that work, not the raw generations
• audio: music and most of the sound are synthesized live in webaudio. a few cc0 recordings from freesound are cut, looped and layered into that soundscape, they change with the star and react to the game
• ui: honestly the least finished part. i ran out of time and it ended up close to the default ai look. it is the first thing i am redoing after the jam

the rules on this, for anyone curious (can i use ai?):

"AI powered tools can be used, but you may have to opt-out of certain categories"

"if you transform something from a content generator into something new, it may count as a derivative work"

and for the compo the rules allow samples and loops "only if they are used to create a derivative work. i.e. a Song, a complex soundscape". that is exactly how the recordings are used here.

analytics: this build sends anonymous play stats to posthog: session length, how far you get, fps, where people quit. no personal data, no ip, no accounts. it is there to see where the game loses players.

sound credits (all cc0, freesound.org): Elektrocell, BenjaminNelan, ihitokage, bmusic92, MWsfx, Fission9, Turrus