A vector-graphics homage to Omega Race (Midway, 1981) — Midway's only vector arcade game — written in Rust. The wordplay is intentional.
You fly the last Omegan fighter around a race track in space. A droid convoy circles the track seeding it with mines, and escalates: Droids become Command Ships that shoot back, Command Ships become Death Ships that hunt you. The borders are force fields — you bounce off them, and good pilots bounce on purpose.
cargo run --release| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| ← → / A D | rotate (spinner-fast) |
| ↑ / W | thrust |
| Space | fire (max 4 shots live) |
| Enter | start |
| P | pause · M mute · F fullscreen · Esc back |
Extra ship at 40,000 and 100,000, then every 100,000. Every 4th wave cleared pays a FLEET BONUS 5000 and sweeps the track of mines.
The game emits vectors, not pixels: game logic writes a display list of line segments each frame, exactly like the original's CPU fed its X-Y monitor. Two backends consume it:
- Screen — macroquad, with a phosphor pipeline: additive line pass, persistence buffer (decaying trails), and a separable Gaussian glow.
- Headless — a pure-CPU rasterizer that writes PNGs with no window or GPU, driven by scripted inputs at a fixed 60 Hz with a seeded RNG, so any moment of gameplay is reproducible byte-for-byte:
cargo run --release -- --headless --frames 720 --shot-every 30 \
--out shots --script verify/wave1.scriptEvery glyph on screen is a stroke font (segment lists) — no TTFs, no fills,
no sprites. All sound is synthesized at startup in the flavour of the
original's twin AY-3-8912 PSGs: square waves, noise bursts, fast sweeps —
including a convoy heartbeat that accelerates as the fleet thins.
--dump-sfx DIR writes the generated bank as WAVs.
DESIGN.md is the full creative brief; verify/ holds the scripted
demos used to visually verify each milestone.
Directed by Claude (Fable 5) as creative lead; implemented milestone-by- milestone by GPT-5.6 via Codex, each stage verified through the headless harness. Gameplay values (350/500/1000/1500/2500 points, bonus ships at 40k/100k) follow the 1981 original.