Space Miner (Tech Demo)

Waking up from suspended animation, you find yourself at the helm of an extremely advanced mining ship. With an incredibly dense asteroid cluster at your fingertips, why not take it for a spin?

This prototype is the result of some tech I spun off from something else, then got put on hold for about a year. Recently, I wanted to show it off to someone, found out the repo was a bit of a mess, and asked the infamous question: "how hard could this be to fix up?" A month later, and this is the result. 

As is, there's no "gameplay loop" -- just asteroids to burn through. I could wax lyrical about planned features and roadmap (the window title is your hint), but this mostly exists to show off the lighting, particle, and geometric effects. The game itself is built on SDL3 (with SDL_GPU) and Box2D v3; both are excellent.

Controls:

• Arrow keys: fly around
• 1-5: use tools (laser, tractor, flare, bomb, "vaporizer" (debug tool))
• Shift: boost
• Z: auto-brake
• X: deploy shield
• Return: teleport to origin (debug)
• Forward slash: change light level (debug)
• Backspace: clean up small fragments (debug)
• Equals: toggle unlimited energy mode (debug)

Known issues:

• Ruined ships can spawn in asteroids
• Asteroids can spawn overlapped
• Lighting can be erratic when multiple bright sources are close to a single polygon
• Some laptops struggle creating a vulkan context
• Performance degrades when many lights are on screen

Update: 26-2-6

• Reduced the number of particles created when using the "vaporizer" beam, dramatically improving performance
• Increased engine limits for entities and shapes, making it much harder to see a crash from having more than 16k entities
• Added an "unlimited energy" toggle on the equals key