GoKawiil2026-07-30
14 mins read
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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.
<a href="https://gingerbeardman.itch.io/beltrunner">BELTRUNNER by gingerbeardman</a>
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).
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