Star Breaker

The void finally has a voice. 🎵

Until today the three void weapons — the game’s endgame centerpiece — all fired in complete silence. Hand-wrote a distinct sound for each in our tiny WebAudio synth (still zero audio files, every sound is code):

• VOID SPEAR — a “void tear”: a short sawtooth rip, a hollow square-wave body, and a long sub-bass hum underneath. We auditioned three candidates (abyss whoosh / tritone ritual blade / void tear) and the tear won.
• LIGHT WANDERER — an “electric blessing”: a rising triangle-wave triad (C5-E5-G5) with two square-wave spark crackles on top.
• ASTRONOMIC WANDERER — split in two so it stays in sync with the meteor’s variable fall time: a falling whistle when the rock is called, and a deep quake + crunch at the exact frame of impact.

Each sound has its own spam gate (120-200ms) so ability-haste builds don’t turn the mix into porridge.

Best part: while testing I found the game’s audio unlock only lived on the Menu buttons. Any path that skips the menu ran the ENTIRE game silent — music included. One first-pointerdown listener in main.js fixed a bug nobody had ever reported.

The v=98 build is packaged and ships to itch tonight: https://raidentechnology.itch.io/starbreaker

Tomorrow: GMTK Game Jam. See you on the other side. ⭐

The biggest update since launch. There is a whole second half of the game now, and the first half plays very differently.

v1.1 shipped days ago. Since then I have been building and, more usefully, measuring — the game had a lot of numbers nobody had ever checked, including me.

THE VOID
From NORMAL up, a kill can tear the sky open. The void washes across the map, then purple elites arrive through separate rifts — WARRIOR (snares you), ASSASSIN (fast, triple damage), TANK (4x health, aura). Each gets one 50% revive. They pay VOID credits, a currency you cannot grind normally.

THE VOID BAZAAR [V]
Three armaments, an exclusive pick — taking one empties your gun slots. VOID SPEAR (cone slash; kills stack permanent armour), LIGHT WANDERER (light waves + chain lightning), ASTRONOMIC WANDERER (meteor strikes; revives you once). They are abilities, not guns: self-firing, scaling with ability haste, each with a max-HP bonus. Switching is free after paying the price gap once. Each evolves, and each has a red PREMIUM CAPSTONE card that rewrites it: time stop, heal-per-sweep, orbital judgement.

THE PILOT AND THE ARMOURY [G]
The ship is gone — you are a pilot who visibly wears what you equip. Four armour slots, seven rarities, eight reforges, its own skill ladder; UNIQUE pieces can be void-forged to double defense.

DOCTRINES
At floor 5 you pick one of three, once per run: GUNSLINGER, VOID-TOUCHED or ENGINEER. Each opens its half of the skill tree and closes the other two — runs finally diverge.

MATERIALS AND THE FABRICATOR [X]
Five materials from five activities, seven recipes, from repair kits to a permanent hull plate. The best reforges are now bought with VOID credits at a fixed counter, not gambled for.

SKILL TREE: 46 nodes, 16 tiers, 109 ranks. The far end costs millions on purpose.

PERSISTENCE: runs live in localStorage now. Plus TODAY’S EXPEDITION — one seeded daily run, same for everyone, one life — and the CORE FORGE, an endless meta tier.

BALANCE — WHERE I STOPPED GUESSING
I spent a day measuring. Highlights:

• The anti-idle system had never once fired (menus reset its timer). Fixed — a parked ship dies in 30 seconds now.
• Enemy health was clamped to your own DPS, and the clamp always bound: time-to-kill was exactly 2.00s at every floor of every difficulty, so every damage upgrade was cosmetic. The anchor is now a floor expectation; real damage only supplies guard rails (6.0s neglected / 2.0s kept pace / 0.5s min-maxed).
• A void loadout emptied your gun slots, so the game read you as zero damage and INFERNAL died in one hit. Fixed.
• Boss sizing only saw your active gun — a fifth of a real build — so bosses died in under a second. NIGHTMARE bosses now run ~8s.
• Void damage compounded to x50 by floor 29. Capped at 2-3x — still the best chase.
• The meteor is aimed by hand now: click to call it.
• TRIPLE TRIGGER 25%→60% cost, SMG −35%, HOMING −75%→−30%, flat 50% death penalty, enemy count scales past floor 10, armour benefits from LUCK now.

Plus a long fix list: cone weapons missing targets standing inside them, time stop ignoring mid-stop spawns, pets flying into enemies’ faces — and two whole systems (ARMOURY, FABRICATOR) that shipped without appearing in any menu. The hotkey bar is colour-coded chips now, and there is a REFORGE CODEX.

KNOWN: a life’s first boss is still short — no data to size it yet.

WHAT’S NEXT: GMTK Game Jam starts July 22nd, so I am away a few days building something small. Feedback very welcome — especially if something feels too slow or a doctrine is the wrong pick. I have done enough guessing.

Thanks for playing ⭐

STAR BREAKER is live — free, in your browser, on desktop AND mobile: https://raidentechnology.itch.io/starbreaker

This game started as my training project for GMTK Game Jam 2026 (2 days to go!). I wanted to learn the full loop: build a game, balance it, polish it, ship it. Somewhere along the way it grew into a full space-mining roguelite:

• Break asteroids, hunt pirates, climb from METEOROID to STAR
• 4 weapons x 7 rarities — with evolutions, reforges and synthesis
• A 37-node skill tree split into 3 stages — clear one circuit to reveal the next
• Robot pets, orbital turrets, deployable ground turrets
• 7 ascending difficulties with shielded, phase-gated bosses, ending at THE STARBREAKER itself
• Full touch controls: virtual joystick, auto-aim, tap-to-target orbital strikes

At launch, everything you saw and heard was generated procedurally in code — no art or audio assets. Partly as a challenge, partly as prep for the jam’s no-AI-assets rule. (The v1.2 update has since added two AI-generated enemy sprites — I’d rather say that openly than let the old claim stand; details in the next devlog.)

The game launched July 17 and the code is open source (MIT) on GitHub: https://github.com/RaidenTechnology/star-breaker

What’s next: GMTK Game Jam 2026 starts July 22nd. After that I’ll come back to STAR BREAKER with balance patches — early feedback is very welcome.

Cheetah + railgun feels strong. Prove me wrong.

Thanks for playing ⭐