Vector Blaster 2000

An Asteroids-style outline shooter — ship, shots, and rocks are all drawn as draw_line polygons, no sprites — built with Spinel and sdl as a demo of the sdl bindings.

This is the enhanced edition of vector_blaster, forked off to add sound and visual effects on top of the same gameplay. vector_blaster itself is kept deliberately plain — no audio, minimal effects — so it stays an easy example for new devs to read start to finish; this project is where the fancier stuff (that would otherwise clutter that reading experience) lives instead.

Requirements

• Spinel (spin)
• SDL3, statically linked via the sdl package — no brew install needed at build or run time

Install Spinel

With asdf:

asdf plugin add spinel https://github.com/jockofcode/asdf-spinel
asdf install spinel master
asdf set -u spinel master   # make it the default (~/.tool-versions)

Or build it from source:

git clone https://github.com/matz/spinel.git
cd spinel
make
export PATH="$PWD/bin:$PATH"
cd -

Play

spin run vector_blaster_2000

Or build first and run the binary directly:

spin build
./build/bin/vector_blaster_2000

Controls

Key	Action
Left / Right	Rotate ship
Up	Thrust
Space	Fire
W	Warp to the spot on screen with the most open room around it
R	Restart (after game over)
Esc	Quit

Sound

Procedural retro bleeps via SDL::Audio.beep — no sound asset files. It's a single shared, queued mono stream (see sdl's own docs), so effects are kept short and the continuous thrust sound is throttled to a periodic engine "tick" rather than firing every frame. Fire, thrust, asteroid splits/destructions, ship loss, warp (a faked three-note rising sweep), and level-up (a three-note fanfare) each get a distinct tone.