About
Hi, I'm Marcel
I make this game on my own and I've been at it since 2014.
Me
It's just me: Marcel Scherf, working under the name NextLevel.is.
The whole thing started over Christmas 2014. I was animating a dot on a canvas to find out how games move things around at all, and that became a prototype, and then it sat there. In 2022 I rewrote it in Rust on the Bevy engine, which was great fun, and then it sat there again. In 2024 it landed back in the browser with PixiJS. This September it became a game. Everything is in the devlog, videos as well.
It comes back around every two or three years and it's always the one I end up wanting to work on. I don't really know why that is.
There is no deadline on any of this. Some months I don't touch it at all. When there is something to show I put it on YouTube and write a mail.
Tech
TypeScript, and Preact for all the parts that are not the canvas. The canvas itself is PixiJS 8 on top of WebGL. Vite builds it, bun runs the tooling.
The asteroids and the ships are not drawn by hand, they're fragment shaders. The game bakes them once when a contract starts and lights them live after that, so an asteroid turns and cracks open where you mine it, and the entire belt is still a single instanced draw call. The sky is a shader as well and just runs. Pretty cool!
The save lives in your browser, so there's no account and nothing to install.
Credits
I didn't make the sound effects or the music, and the sprites I started with back in 2014 came off OpenGameArt. Everybody is named on the credits page.