Show HN: A macOS game with zero asset files – terrain, sound, art all generated

2 points

7 hours ago

Strataris is a first-person colony-defence shoot-'em-up for macOS — Defender by way of Rescue on Fractalus. But the reason I'm posting it here is the build constraint: there are no asset files at all. No textures, no audio files, no 3-D models, no fonts.

Everything is generated in code:

- Terrain is fractal-noise (fbm) heightmaps rendered as a GPU triangle mesh, height-banded and slope-shaded, that composites with a hand-built 2-D HUD and gets blit-upscaled nearest-neighbour for the pixelated look. - Ships & buildings are flat-shaded low-poly hulls, a handful of triangles each. - Music & SFX come from a from-scratch synth (square/saw/triangle/noise/rumble voices plus a Karplus-Strong plucked string, with envelopes, overdrive and a limiter). The title theme is an original generative build. - Radio comms are speech rendered offline and band-pass-filtered into a crackly cockpit-radio timbre, with squelch and roger bleeps. - Fonts are a 5×7 bitmap for the HUD plus a Core Text rasteriser.

The result is ~0.85 MB per architecture — smaller than the asset payload of many single web pages, and it fits on a 1.44 MB floppy with room to spare. Native Swift + Metal, no engine.

It's open source (the renderer is the interesting part) and free. Builds as a universal binary via a gmake pipeline. Would love feedback from anyone who's done procedural/demoscene-style work.

Source + downloads: https://github.com/PerpetualBeta/Strataris Product page: https://jorviksoftware.cc/games/strataris