Tether Drift

The problem

A ship that keeps drifting after you stop pushing is the oldest trick in the vector room. Inertia gives a ship a personality you learn the way you learn a bicycle. The problem with an old trick is that players already know it. How do you make momentum new again without adding a manual?

The rule that solved it

Give the player two bodies to read at once. Your small ship tows a heavy slug on an elastic line, and the slug is what does the work. The note on the game’s page calls it a pendulum you control from the wrong end. Swing it into drifting debris fast enough and the junk shatters: the slug only breaks things when it hits at a relative speed above 80, so a slow bump just pushes them away. Smash the smallest shards and they release cores, which pay ten times your combo.

The second rule is the one that teaches itself. From wave 3, pylons appear, and a line that rests across one for half a second snaps. Stretch the line too far and it snaps too. The physics punishes carelessness, and nobody has to read a rule to learn it. A loose slug can be caught again by flying near it. Hold the reel to pull the slug in close.

What we left out

What we left out was the solid picture. Every shape is a glowing outline on black, because vector graphics were once a hardware limit and here they are the point: the thing you can hit and the thing that can hit you are easy to read at a glance.

Try this

Spend the first wave not breaking anything. Fly in a wide circle and watch how the slug lags behind, then swings out past you when you turn. Once you can predict that swing, aim it. Notice that cores vanish after eleven seconds and the combo times out after 3.2, so a good run is a chain of swings, not a single big one. When the pylons arrive, try flying round one on purpose, slowly, and see how long the line will rest across it.

The maker’s note

A slug on an elastic line is a pendulum you control from the wrong end, which takes a minute to learn and a long time to master. Wrapping the line around a pylon snaps it, so the physics punishes carelessness without a single rule being explained. Vector graphics were a hardware limit once; here they are the point.

This is the note printed on the game’s own page. The Vector Hall explains the idea it borrows, under three design ideas we borrowed.