Rock Blaster is a vector-style space shooter where you steer a tiny triangle ship through a field of tumbling rocks. Every rock you hit cracks into smaller, faster pieces, so the screen gets busier before it gets clear. Saucers cut across now and then and fire back. The ship keeps drifting after you let go of thrust, and anything that leaves one edge of the screen comes back on the other. Frank Force made it as part of his open-source LittleJS Arcade collection.
How to Play Rock Blaster
Press PLAY and your ship appears in the middle of the screen, blinking for a moment while it can’t be hurt. A wave of large rocks drifts in from the edges. Turn to face one, fire, and watch it split in two. Medium rocks split again, and small rocks vanish when hit.
The first wave has four large rocks, and each new wave adds one more. A wave only ends when every rock and every saucer is gone. You can have five shots on screen at once, and each shot fades after about a second and a half.
Saucers appear every so often. The big one fires in random directions, while the small one aims ahead of where you are flying, and its aim gets sharper as your score climbs. Their shots can also break rocks, but you get no points for those.
Hitting a rock, a saucer or a saucer shot costs a ship. The LIVES counter starts at 3, and the game ends when you crash with it at zero.
Rock Blaster Controls
| Action | Keyboard | Mouse | Touch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Turn the ship | Left and Right arrows, or A and D | — | Push the on-screen stick left or right |
| Thrust forward | Up arrow or W | — | Bottom button |
| Fire | Space or Z | — | Left or right button |
| Hyperspace jump | Left Shift or X | — | Top button |
| Pause | Esc | — | — |
| Use the menus | — | Click PLAY, OPTIONS or HELP | Tap the menu buttons |
Tips and Strategies
- Tap thrust instead of holding it. The ship coasts for a long time, so short bursts are easier to stop than one long push.
- Break one big rock at a time. Each hit doubles the number of pieces. Clearing the small fragments before splitting the next large rock keeps the screen calm.
- Watch the screen edges. Rocks and shots wrap around, so a piece leaving the right side can hit you from the left.
- Go after small saucers quickly. They are worth five times the big ones, and their aim improves as you score more.
- Keep the jump for last. Hyperspace can place you near a rock, so use it only when a crash is certain anyway.
Features
- Splitting rocks: large rocks break into medium ones, and medium rocks break into small ones.
- Two saucer types with different shooting styles and point values.
- Bonus ships every 10,000 points.
- Saved best score shown on the title screen, plus a volume slider and an optional glow effect.
- Keyboard, gamepad and touch support, including an on-screen stick and buttons.
Tested and updated:
