Starboard Delivery is a small arcade game about hauling packages through asteroid traffic, and today we are talking about why the boxes bounce the way they do.

The core loop

You grab a crate, you dodge rocks, you deliver before the timer laughs at you. Simple. Then the physics happened.

• Crates have momentum, so stopping is a negotiation.


• Asteroids spin, and spinning things are rude.


• Your thruster overheats, which is a feature, not a bug. Probably.

Here is the embarrassingly small function that makes a crate feel heavy:

CODE 
vec2 applyDrag(vec2 vel, float dt) {
    float k = 0.98;      // space is not frictionless here, sue us
    return vel * pow(k, dt * 60.0);
}

And here is what a good run looks like right before it goes wrong:



We tuned the difficulty for exactly one week and then a tester delivered a crate backwards through a moon. So that is fixed now. Mostly.

Try the latest build notes on https://madsplash.net/projects and yell about the thruster on the boards.