Use ← and → (the left and right arrow keys) to turn the ship, x to accelerate, and z to shoot. Right-click somewhere inside the game window to bring up some options.
Obviously, you control the little yellow ship and it’s your job to destroy, but avoid hitting, the asteroids randomly floating around each level.
The green pokey spinning things are aliens—avoid them altogether or shoot them for bonus points (note that they shoot back at you, so watch out).
The wireframe octahedra that sometimes drift across the screen are powerups. To collect the powerups, run over them; or you can shoot them for bonus points (if you don’t want the benefit of the powerup).
As though everything I just said wasn’t self-explanatory, everything about the gameplay that I DIDN’T mention certainly is, so I’m going to shut up now.
In the Win32 version, simply unzip to somewhere you’ll remember. You could even make a shortcut to the unzipped executable in your start menu.
To install the Unix version (which you’ll need to do before you can play), do
$ ./configure $ make
and then, as root
# make install
Then you can just type asteroid [your_name] (from wherever), to play.
At this point, I really am pretty much done programming this game. It’s got all the features a good Asteroids clone needs, and a few extraneous ones to boot. I’ll probably only update the game if any bugs come to my attention (so it’s your job to notify me (charles [at] chaoslizard [dot] org) if you find any). I mean, what more could you want from an Asteroids clone?
Ideas for improvement:
Since this is open source software, I encourage you to implement these ideas (many of which came from my man Eric Davis, not myself) as well as any other ideas you can come up with. If you do enhance/modify the game, I’d love to see the results of your work—please drop me an email (charles [at] chaoslizard [dot] org) and tell me where I can download it! Note that as this game is released under the GNU GPL, there are certain conditions you must abide by to modify this source. Look to the copyright notice near the bottom of this readme for more info.
I just want to note how the game calculates certain values or probabilities, so you don’t have to go hunting through the source.
First, number of starting asteroids is calculated as:
round( 2 + ln(level) )
So, level 1 has 2 asteroids, levels 2, 3, and 4 have 3, etc. Level 34 is the first level to have 6 asteroids; level 91 starts with 7 asteroids. Good luck getting that far.
Next, probability of spawning an alien EACH GAME FRAME:
1 in floor( 1500*bigasteroids + 500*mediumasteroids + 16384/(score^(log_10 2)) )
So, when the screen is clear of big asteroids and medium asteroids (only small asteroids remain): if your score is 10000, every frame there is a 1 in 1024 chance of spawning an alien; at score 50000, it’s 1 in 630; 100000 yields 1 in 512. As you can see, the chance gradually increases until they are swarming you. Note that the chance dramatically increases as you clear each level—when there are lots of big and medium asteroids in the level, your probability of seeing aliens is pretty small. Also note that no aliens appear until level 3, at the soonest, and that small aliens don’t appear until your score hits 10000. Oh, I should also mention that each time an alien is to spawn, if your score is above 10000 there is a 2/3 chance it’ll be big.
Now, the chance for getting a powerup each frame is:
1 in 1000*(lives + 2)
So, when you have no extra lives, you have a 1 in 2000 chance each frame of getting a powerup; 1 extra life means a 1 in 3000 chance, etc. Note that the powerup type is completely random, with equal probability of getting each type.
Asteroids is originally copyright © 1979 Atari, Inc. This version of Asteroids is copyright © 2003, 2005 Charles Lindsay, and is released under the GNU General Public License. As such, it comes with absolutely no warranty of any kind, whatsoever. See the GNU General Public License for more info.