ROCHE

Two worlds, one sky

Two planets hang facing each other, close enough to share a sky. You stand on yours; the enemy hangs overhead on theirs — and on their screen, you are the one hanging overhead. Every shell has to climb out of your gravity well, coast through the Roche null band where the two pulls cancel and the ion wind takes over, then fall upward into their well. Under-power a shot and it comes back down on your own head.

The name is the astrophysics: the Roche lobes of a binary system are the regions where matter is bound to one body or the other, meeting at the L1 point where gravity goes to zero. That boundary is the whole game.

Simultaneous orders

Each round, both commanders secretly commit one order — MOVE or FIRE — and the round resolves in a single shared playback. Moves happen during the first moments of the resolution, so a shell aimed at where they are can miss where they will be. Shoot the future, not the present.

The arsenal

• SLUG — infinite. Honest ballistics.
• MASS DRIVER — heavy, falls hard, drifts little, hits like a grudge.
• CLUSTER — splits into five exactly at the null crossing; the wind fans the shrapnel.
• RETRO — brakes after crossing the band and drops plumb. The precision instrument.
• TUNNELER — drills through rock before detonating. Crater-campers beware.

Supply pods land every other round — move onto one to collect it. Some maps pair a heavy world with a light one: the null line sits off-centre and the heavy side pays more to escape.

Three ways to fight

• VS CPU — the scored mode. The CPU aims by simulating real shots and walks its fire onto you.
• HOTSEAT — pass one device, orders concealed behind a hand-over curtain.
• ONLINE — async matches over the Arcade SDK: create a match, share the 8-character code, play a round whenever you both find a minute. First order is sealed; both clients replay the identical deterministic resolution.

Controls

• Drag from your tank (or ← → / ↑ ↓) — aim angle and power
• 1–5 — select ordnance · SPACE — commit fire
• A / D + ENTER — plan and commit a move
• H / P / ESC — pause & controls · M — mute

The physics is a fixed 1/240 s integration under planar two-body gravity, bit-deterministic across clients from one seeded RNG — 200 random rounds resolved twice with zero mismatches. One self-contained HTML file, WebAudio-only sound (the null band is audible: listen for the pitch bend as your shell crosses), full keyboard and touch parity.