I grew up playing scorched Earth on Windows 3 just over a thousand years ago, and have always enjoyed that game. here is my implementation using a circular world with basic orbital dynamics added. in theory it works on mobile as well, but is best intended to be a PC browser game.

in the interest of transparency, this was generated on qwen 3.8: 27b, so you should consider the "my implementation" loose at best.

I'd love feedback on what works and what doesn't.

some weapons, such as the laser satellite and the peacock feather have additional actions that can be commanded after the initial launch. for instance the laser satellite will shoot a laser in whatever the current orientation is, and the peacock feather will split up into multiple feathers when pressing the space button or the fire button again.

enjoy!

cool, i played a fair bit of scorch

misc feedback

  - dominant strategy seems to be drive to point blank range & fire. needs some playtesting & rework to make it interesting for 2 players.
  - how do you bring up help for a reminder of what the controls are once the game is in progress?
  - the arrow keys for controlling the turret are unintuitive. i'd expect left & right arrows to change the barrel angle, like in the original scorched earth, but here they change the power level
  - the visual trajectory preview doesnt seem useful whenever the moon is involved as by the time you fire, the moon has moved the trajectory is wildly different to whatever the preview showed

one perspective i've heard some game developers talk about when prototyping a new game is focusing on trying to improve the length of time a player can have fun before they get sick of it. is it fun for 5 seconds? what could i do to increase that to make it fun for a whole 30 seconds? for 60 seconds?

You can just roll up to the other player and shoot them in the face?!

I've always enjoyed "Space Tanks." Beyond the whole gravity stuff, it was FUN. Silly designs, bouncy weapons, upgrading tanks..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Tanks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8yvSl9j9yU

Thanks for sharing and nicely done, I enjoyed it.

Feature request: no shake effect after victory.

Moving L/R is OP

Bet this one has fascinating edge cases involving armor plating and projectile trajectories. Makes dining philosophers look easy.

You should make it so you can coerce the moon to fall out of orbit, crash into the planet and destroy half of it.

Very cool! it seems like the first player can't switch weapons though.