Rock Splitter
In the spirit of the classic asteroid-shooting game.
Rocks drift across the field, each carrying a character. Type it and the turret fires: a big rock breaks into two smaller ones, and the smallest are gone in a single shot.
Play Rock Splitter · free accountCreate a free account to open Rock Splitter.Words taken apart in front of you
On the word levels after fifty, a big rock carries a whole word. Shoot it and it breaks into two rocks carrying the two halves of that word; shoot those and you are left with one rock per character, each of which takes a single shot. It is the clearest picture in the arcade of what a word is made of, and it runs backwards from the way you usually meet one: whole first, pieces after.
Everything you break makes more to read
A big rock is seven characters of work by the time every fragment is gone, so the field gets busier before it gets emptier. Fragments fly apart faster than the rock they came from, which is why the last few pieces of a big rock are the ones that reach your ship.
The ship
Your ship holds the middle of the screen and turns to face whatever you shoot. A rock that reaches it holes the hull and costs a life; everything nearby is then shoved clear so you are not hit twice in a second. A mistyped character speeds the whole belt up. Now and then a scout crosses the field carrying a character from the tier above yours, worth a large bonus.
Six fields
Home orbit, a dust cloud, an ice field, a nebula shoal and an iron belt, one per tier, with a pulsar drift for the word levels.