NIGHTSIDE

Planetary Shield

You are the shield. Turn the handset to aim it, and stop what is coming.

A panel of a shell around Earth follows your phone's rotation. Meteors arriving on that bearing are disintegrated; the ones you miss leave craters on a planet that remembers them.

Coming soon to Google Play

The Nightside title screen: Earth turning against a starfield, a lit rectangular shield panel in orbit above the Atlantic, and the readout 'shield active · 4000 × 2247 km · 74.4W 31.9N'. — The title screen, which is the game playing itself from outside. The Earth below it is the real one, at the moment the shot was taken.

The idea

The screen is a visor, not a controller.

Most games on a handset ask you to press a picture of a thing. This one asks you to turn. Your phone's three-axis rotation picks which rectangular panel of a spherical shield around Earth is live, and the screen looks outward through it into space.

The panel is a mirror showing the ground it is covering, so blocking a rock visibly saves a specific place — a coastline, an ice sheet, a city with its lights still on. There is no aiming stick, no fire button. There is where you are pointed, and where the next one is going.

The view through the shield: a lit rectangular panel mirroring southern Africa and the Indian Ocean, with two red threat markers outside it and the readout 'shielding 12.1E 18.0S · sun over 25.5E 8.9N'. — The panel, mirroring the coast it is over. The red markers are the next two arrivals; the chevrons and the shaft say which way to turn and how far. Shown here in a development build, with its telemetry readout on screen.

The sky

Real, and computed on the handset.

Earth, Sun and Moon are placed from the actual current time. The day/night terminator falls where it does outside your window, the Moon shows its true phase and elongation, and sunlight comes from where the Sun really is — which is also why glare makes rocks arriving from that direction harder to catch.

The name is that terminator. The nightside is the half the shield has to hold in the dark, and it is a real place at a real hour, not a backdrop.

None of it comes off a server. Positions are computed on the device against the standard astronomical algorithms and checked, in the test suite, to under an arcminute — against a Sun and Moon half a degree wide.

In play

What a round is made of.

A block is graded

Catching a rock somewhere on the glass scores 5. Catching it dead centre scores 25. The outer edge of the drawn panel holds nothing at all, and says so loudly.
One mission a day

The same rocks, in the same order, for everybody on Earth that date — derived from the date itself, stored nowhere. Three attempts, best one kept.
The ground remembers

A hit on land leaves a crater with a raised rim, and the city lights around it go out. A hit on water raises a wave that runs outward and breaks at the coastline.
It tells you what's next

The next few arrivals are ranked and marked, with an arrow whose length is how far you still have to turn. It never tells you to give up on one — that call is yours.

Availability

Android first. Not out yet.

The game is built and running on hardware; it is not on a store. Google Play is first, and an iOS version is intended after it — the sensor work is the only part that has to be written twice.

Google PlayComing soon

App StoreIntended, later

NeedsA phone with a gyroscope

ConnectionNone — no backend, no accounts

Published bySohkrana

The screen is a visor, not a controller.

Real, and computed on the handset.

What a round is made of.

A block is graded

One mission a day

The ground remembers

It tells you what's next

Android first. Not out yet.