ROCHE

Two worlds, one gravity

Your planet is under your feet. The enemy's hangs overhead — nine planet-widths of open space away — and everything between obeys real two-body gravity, nothing else. Every shell climbs out of your well, crosses the L1 point where the two pulls cancel, and falls up into theirs — or doesn't. Throw too hard and it leaves the system. Throw too soft and it comes home, sometimes half an orbit later, on the far side of your own planet. Throw it just right and it loops the enemy world in a full revolution — their pull walking your orbit down each pass — until it lands a metre from where you aimed.

You start on the crown of your world; they start on the face of theirs, staring down at you. Round one is a straight shot across the gap. Everything after that is orbital mechanics. And on their screen, the whole sky is the other way up: you are the world hanging overhead.

The name is the astrophysics: the Roche lobes of a binary are the regions where matter belongs to one body or the other, meeting at L1. Your shells live and die by that boundary. A thin plasma stream drifts through the L1 corridor — you can see it — and it nudges only what coasts slowly through; everywhere else, trajectories are clean conics.

Simultaneous orders

Each round, both commanders secretly commit one order — MOVE or FIRE — and the round resolves in a single shared playback. Moves happen in the first moments of the resolution, so you shoot where they will be, not where they are. A director camera chases the shells, compressing the long coasts and dropping into slow motion for every terminal approach; grab the wheel (or pinch) any time to fly it yourself, and F re-frames the system.

Every shot leaves a luminous trail, and last round's ghosts still hang in the sky while you aim. The trails are the tutorial — the gravity teaches itself.

The arsenal

Every shell falls identically — vacuum doesn't care what it weighs. The gun does: one fixed impulse, so heavier shells leave slower.

• SLUG — infinite. Honest ballistics.
• MASS DRIVER — heavy: slow off the rail, needs real power to escape, hits like a grudge.
• CLUSTER — light and quick; bursts into a mechanical fan of five the instant the enemy's well takes over.
• RETRO — burns retrograde on entering their well 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. Maps vary: a heavy giant against a cratered moonlet moves L1 far off-centre, and on some maps the planets spin a little each round, so the firing geometry never sits still.

Three ways to fight

• VS CPU — the scored mode. It simulates real candidate shots, walks its fire onto you — and sometimes takes the orbital solution just to show you it exists.
• HOTSEAT — pass one device, orders concealed behind a hand-over curtain; the sky flips with the seat.
• 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 — ordnance · SPACE — commit fire · A / D + ENTER — plan and commit a move
• Wheel / pinch / drag — camera · F — re-frame · H / P / ESC — pause & controls · M — mute

Under the hood: true inverse-square gravity from both bodies integrated at a fixed 1/240 s, bit-deterministic across clients from one seeded RNG (200 random rounds resolved twice: zero mismatches), destructible radial terrain, and a solver-verified orbital kill on every map — sustained by apsidal precession in the two-centre field, not by any scripted push. One self-contained HTML file, WebAudio-only sound, full keyboard and touch parity.