Space Surfer

Created in a little under a week for Physics Jam 2026 | South Africa

You're an 'all gas no brakes' type of SpaceMan with a hoverboard that goes way too fast. See how far you can travel before you lose control, and try to make it onto the Top 10 Global Leaderboard.

About

I've always felt nostalgic about the old double-spaced pixels from videogames of old (old Space Quest games), and wanted to try doing something similar. Used a very limited 4-colour CGA colour palette, the image is created at normal pixel size and uses Unity's Pixel Perfect Camera, then the image is stretched to a texture that's 2x on the X to get the double-width pixels while still staying snapped to a true pixel grid.

Process

There's a bunch of different level 'chunks' (like pieces of the level that span the width of the screen) that get spawned at runtime just off the right of the screen and move to the left before they get destroyed, to simulate the travel. There's 3 categories of chunks: Common chunks, Uncommon chunks with a 20% chance to appear, and Rare chunks with a 10% chance to appear. 

Drew all the stuff in Aseprite, build it up slowly and modularly starting with the character controller, used Google Gemini to write the code (9 scripts in total) and tried to keep things neat and simple throughout. Started with just the Player in a static room to get the hoverboard feel right, and then progressed from there.

The game is drawn at normal pixel size, then Unity's Pixel Perfect Camera does its thing by upscaling pixels to a pixel grid to keep pixels crisp, then I have some system like a camera that gets rendered to a texture that is then scaled 2x on the x-axis to stretch the image out double the size sideways to get the retro double-width pixels, and that texture is what's displayed on screen.

Full WebGL build is under 18mb, which I'm happy about - should load nice and quickly for most.

Having spent a long time building point & click adventure games I wanted to make something FAST and action-packed - hence this endless runner / surfer with ma boi klapping it!

An initial sketch before trying out the idea in practice:

Early prototype:

Extra

- Top 10 online leaderboard service provided for free by LootLocker

- Music: STAR TRAK by The Kiffness and Raiven Hunter