Space Surfer – Unbridled Speed

Header Image

Bros. I made a game for the Physics Jam 2026 | South Africa

It’s called SPACE SURFER because ma doodz believe it or not you surf… IN SPACE.

itch.io page link

You go SUPER FAST. So fast, sometimes you leave the entire level contents behind. It’s one thing making something, and another thing completely writing / talking about it.

Video

This post is gonna look chaotic with all the sharp colours and GIFs happening, lol. That’s kind of the game – controlled chaos. And sometimes uncontrolled chaos. That’s why I’m using headings.

Gallery of 4 Pictures

You know what? I think I can embed the game right here. You might want to hit that little ‘Full-Screen’ button at the bottom right of the embed to get the game to not be cropped off on the left and right. Use your keyboard to play – Spacebar to go forward, Left and Right (or A and D) to move the hoverboard up and down.

Play the Game Below

Pontification

Well, that’s about it for now. A post won’t really convey the fun I had in making it, step by step from scratch, first using basic graphics to get the surfer’s hoverboard feeling right in a static single room, and then using Google Gemini to write the game’s code scripts, iteration by iteration, to keep things logical, fairly clean and simple and modular-ish. The entire game’s ‘brain’ is like, 9 scripts in total. I used a 4-colour CGA palette to draw the stuff in Aseprite. And most of the project is like, 12mb in total. Very small, sometimes fun working with self-imposed limitations. I guess I went for the Atari/Commodore-64 double-width pixel vibe, which I’ve been thinking about how to implement (weirdly enough I brainstormed the whole setup one day with AI while at gym). And yeh, my bro suggested a track he and Raiven Hunter made called ‘Star Trak’ which seemed to work perfectly, so they kindly gave me permission to use it. I used an Ovani sound pack ‘Retro’ for the retro bleeps and bloops sfx.

The game is drawn at normal pixel size, then Unity’s Pixel Perfect Camera does its thing by upscaling pixels to a pixel grid to keep pixels crisp, then I have some system like a camera that gets rendered to a texture that is then scaled 2x on the x-axis to stretch the image out double the size sideways to get the retro double-width pixels, and that texture is what’s displayed on screen.

I also got a Top 10 Global Leaderboard working, thanks to LootLocker. So, if you get a high score, you can enter 3 letters like the old arcades. Someone who is in #1 somehow managed to travel 7.5 million meters. No idea how they did that. I think my best was like 11,000 meters or something.

Early Prototype

Unity

Early Sketch

I’m currently making another little game for fun, have Italian and Russian translations of the Bru & Boegie Episode 1 game to implement, a freelance project to complete, and that is it for now.

Best, m