Backsight

Frantumi

White vector lines on black with a faint scatter of stars: the player's ship, a small outlined hull ringed in green, high on the right where the long pale arcs of the trajectories cross, the machine's red triangle inside its own circle at the centre, six orange outlined rocks drifting around the edges, the match readout across the top in cyan, score, best, lives, wave and hull at full, the machine's score and hull in red beside it, and the hull's own numbers at the bottom left, mass, propellant, delta-v, speed, acceleration, hull sixty of sixty, damage, rate of fire, heat, Falchion.

Vector rocks, and five hulls that do not agree on physics: a gun platform four times the mass of the next ship, a two-barrel scout that overheats, and three more trades between them.

01. Rereads: Asteroids. Atari, 1979.

1.0 The old rules

Kept whole

Hit a rock and you get two faster rocks.

A ship that can only turn and thrust, momentum that nothing takes away, a screen that wraps at every edge, and rocks that split into smaller and quicker ones each time you hit them.

The 1979 game held all of that on one screen in white lines, and this one keeps the rules, the lines and the arcade around them: a coin to insert, credits to spend, a continue to buy and a table of records signed with three initials.

2.0 The new question

What if every ship obeyed a different physics?

Every hull carries its own physics.

Five ships fly the same field: Falchion, Behemoth, Wasp, Lancer and Trident. The Behemoth carries four times the mass and a shot heavier than five of the Falchion's, and takes its time to get moving; the Wasp fires two barrels in a fan at a higher rate behind the thinnest hull of the five, so it wins the exchange it starts and loses the one it does not.

Burn the last of the propellant and the ship still turns but goes nowhere. Brake, and the nozzles that brake are spending that same propellant. Hold the trigger and the gun heats until it jams. Take a hit and one of seven subsystems breaks, each in its own way. Between waves you pick one card out of three, and every card improves one number by spending another.

Underneath, a deterministic core in Rust runs the Newtonian physics written by hand and held to conservation tests, so the same duel plays out identically on two machines: over Steam with a friend, or ranked and arbitrated by a server of its own.

Trailer, all against all. The deathmatch: from one duel to a field of a hundred and twenty-eight ships with no team and no fleet, every one of them hunting the others.
Trailer. Five hulls, one physics each. No brakes, only mass, through gravity and dust, a ghost to race and a ranked duel at the end.
Trailer, from the duel to the legion. Four ships in a melee, then a crew, a fleet, an armada, and a legion of a hundred and twenty-eight.
Trailer, Newton under the phosphor. The physics on its own: shots bent by gravity, ships caught by it, an orbit to hold and a ghost to race.

3.0 Particulars

As of 2 November 2026

Players
Solo against the waves; a daily challenge on one seed; a race against the clock through six buoys; co-op for two to sixteen in a private room, eight ships in the field at a time and the rest on the bench; rooms of two, four or eight fleets, up to thirty-two, sixty-four and a hundred and twenty-eight seats, each fleet on a field of its own; online duels and co-op through a six-digit room code, with or without Steam; duels against the machine; two on one keyboard and ranked duels online, both in the testers' build
Runs on
Desktop, Linux and Windows, aiming at Steam
Made with
Rust, macroquad, Steamworks
History
A technical preview in 2019, rebuilt from nothing in 2026, and called Asteroids Z until 2026-09-19, when the name was retired over Atari's trademark
State
In development. Solo, the daily challenge, the race, co-op, the fleet rooms and the duels play; online duels and co-op run through the studio's own arbitration server, and the legion of a hundred and twenty-eight has run on it with machine pilots, not yet with a hundred and twenty-eight people. Ranked matches are not in the public build yet, and the look is not tuned yet

4.0 For the press

Take what you need

Write for a build, an interview or an image at a size we have not thought of: hello@backsight.games.