About Space Drift
Space Drift is a zero-gravity shooter. You pilot a small ship that rotates and thrusts but keeps drifting once it is moving, and you must break up waves of asteroids that split into smaller, faster pieces each time you hit them.
How to play
- You have 3 lives. Touching an asteroid costs one, and the game ends when all three are gone. There are no extra lives.
- Wave 1 has 3 large asteroids, and each new wave has one more large asteroid than the one before.
- Shooting a large asteroid scores 20 points and splits it into two medium ones. A medium asteroid scores 50 and splits into two small ones. A small asteroid scores 100 and is destroyed.
- Smaller asteroids move faster than larger ones.
- The ship, its shots and all asteroids wrap around the screen: leave one edge and you reappear on the opposite one.
- Shots last about one second before fading, and you can fire roughly four and a half shots per second by holding the fire control.
- At the start of each wave and after losing a life, the ship returns to the centre and flashes for 2 seconds, during which asteroids cannot hurt it.
Controls
- Keyboard: Left and Right arrows (or A and D) rotate, Up arrow (or W) thrusts forward, Space fires. Holding Space keeps firing.
- On-screen buttons below the game: rotate left, thrust, rotate right and fire. Hold them down for continuous action on touch screens.
- There is no brake. To slow down, turn the ship around and thrust the other way, or wait for it to drift slowly to a stop.
Tips and strategy
- Stay near the centre and rotate to shoot rather than flying around. Every thrust adds momentum you will have to cancel later.
- A single large asteroid is worth 520 points in total once it and all its pieces are destroyed, and most of that comes from the small fragments.
- Avoid breaking up every big rock at once. Many small, fast fragments are far harder to dodge than a few slow big rocks.
- Use the 2-second invulnerability at the start of a wave to get your first shots off and line up on the nearest rock.
- Watch the screen edges. Asteroids that drift off one side come straight back on the other, often close to where you are not looking.
- Shots inherit your ship's speed, so firing while drifting forwards sends them further.
Background
Space Drift draws on Asteroids, released by Atari in 1979 and designed by Lyle Rains and Ed Logg, which used vector graphics to draw a triangular ship and rocks that split when shot. Its inertia-based flying goes back further still, to Spacewar!, written in 1962 by Steve Russell and others on a PDP-1 computer at MIT and often cited as one of the first video games. The idea of a ship that keeps moving after you stop thrusting reflects real physics in space, where there is no friction to slow you down.
Questions
- How many lives do I get?
- Three for the whole game. Clearing a wave does not give you an extra life.
- How are points scored?
- Large asteroids are worth 20, medium ones 50 and small ones 100. Smaller targets are worth more because they are faster and harder to hit.
- Where is my best score saved?
- In your browser's local storage on this device.