BELTRUNNER: game design postmortem  ⌘I  Get Info

Last week I shared a look at an arcade-faithful version of Asteroids to demonstrate the totally new way of making games that I’ve been working on. It’s called Jinks and it’s a lightweight game-engine, interactive development environment, and a language of sorts. This post is a game design postmortem for BELTRUNNER, an original game built from the same bones of Asteroids, and my entry into #GMTKjam 2026. Roughly 1,300 lines for a whole game you can finish. Built on the same system, in same succinct language, with all the same nicities, though I’ll continue to stay a little coy about the machinery for now, mostly because things are still changing so much every day. Things need to settle down so I can describe what it is rather than what it used to be. What I do want to talk about are the design methods that made it in, the ones that didn’t, and the bits the system had to grow so the game could exist. A lot of the methods are old, which is the point. Explorations The prototype was nothing like Asteroids at all. I built an orbital shooter perhaps more like Space Duel: numbered targets on fixed shells around a central sun. As with everything made in Jinks it was quick to bring up, but playing it just wasn’t fun. I had to decided whether it showed promise, and I don’t think it did. Deterministic orbits are sitting ducks. Asteroids’ fun is its unpredictable rock drift—the dodging, not the shooting gallery. Lesson kept: motion chaos is the fun engine; target arrangement is not. Salvage kept: numbered targets, the highlight, the chain, and it got me thinking about the song “Countdown” by Phoenix (Bankrupt!, 2013). I then had the idea to pivot back towards Asteroids, but making the numbered pickups kind of like the rings in Pilotwings or the gates in Wave Race 64. And to dress it all behind a Donkey Kong ‘94 masquerade. Masquerade Stage 1 is pure Asteroids: one large rock, classic thrust-and-drift, classic splits, classic death-and-respawn. The only tell is a race clock that appears on first hit. The first clue that things are not how they seem. Clear the field and instead of “next wave of rocks,” a black hole tears open at screen centre. Gravity pulls you in, and you can do a little dash to help it along. From stage 2 the real game reveals itself.