The journey begins

Every game starts the same way: a blank screen. A window with nothing in it, waiting for you to decide what belongs there. It’s a tale as old as video games themselves, and for a long time that blank screen was all I had.

The oldest thing you could put on a screen like that is a spaceship. Spacewar! ran on a PDP-1 in 1962, with two ships, a star with real gravity, and torpedoes, built by people who had just been handed one of the first computers you could actually watch think. It is, by most reckonings, the first video game. Sixty years later the genre it started is still the first thing everyone reaches for.

You see it everywhere the moment you start learning. Every engine has its little spaceship tutorial. Godot has you dodging creeps, and other engines walk you through your own tiny Asteroids. Valve shipped an entire Spacewar clone on Steam as a networking test, and it’s app 480, the one every developer bumps into before they’ve built anything real. Fly a ship, shoot the rocks. It’s the “hello, world” of games with a physics engine.

I wanted to do something a little different with the oldest idea in the room.

So: Asteroids, more or less. You fly, rocks drift toward you, you shoot them apart. Familiar enough that you already know how to hold the controller. But I added one rule that changes the whole shape of it, because it costs money to shoot. Every shot you fire is money you spent, and every asteroid you destroy is money you didn’t make some safer way. Suddenly the trigger isn’t free. Suddenly the question isn’t “can I hit it,” it’s “can I afford to.”

That’s the whole seed. A sixty-year-old genre, one economic rule bolted on, and the hope that the rule turns a reflex into a decision.

And then the screen goes blank again, because an idea, however good, is still just an idea. Now I have to build it.