A first-person, mesh-terrain shoot-'em-up for macOS. You fly low over alien worlds, defend ground installations from waves of attacking craft, and warp on to the next planet when the skies are clear — chasing a high score across an endless campaign. Defender by way of Rescue on Fractalus, with a period-correct pixelated look.
The first native game in the Jorvik suite — the others (Star Raiders, Centipede, Mr. Do!) are HTML/canvas tributes.
Every pixel and every sound in Strataris is generated in code. There are no textures, no audio files, no 3-D models, no fonts to ship:
- Terrain — seamless fractal-noise (fbm) heightmaps, height-banded colour, slope shading, distance haze.
- Ships & installations — flat-shaded low-poly hulls and colony buildings (towers, domes, hangars, habitats), a handful of triangles each.
- Music & SFX — a from-scratch synthesiser (square/saw/triangle/noise/ rumble voices plus a Karplus-Strong plucked string, with envelopes, overdrive and a limiter); the title theme is an original long-form generative build.
- Radio voice comms — speech rendered offline and band-pass-filtered into a crackly cockpit-radio timbre, with squelch and roger bleeps.
- Fonts — a 5×7 bitmap font for the HUD, plus a Core Text rasteriser for proportional screens.
- Particles — smoke and fire for damaged installations.
The result: the game is ~0.85 MB per architecture — smaller than the asset payload of many single web pages, and it fits on a 1.44 MB floppy with room to spare. Genuinely in the 16-bit spirit: demoscene-style "everything from maths," running as a native Mac app. (The universal binary that carries both Apple Silicon and Intel is ~1.7 MB — so, fittingly, fitting both architectures on one floppy is exactly as impossible as it was in 1995.)
The full shipped
.appis ~6.2 MB, because it embeds the Sparkle auto-updater framework (~3 MB) for in-app updates. The game itself is the ~0.85 MB part.
- Fly and fight. Bank, climb/dive, and throttle a low-flying interceptor over procedurally generated terrain. Fire on attacking craft; a fixed forward cannon and a tracking scope do the aiming work.
- Defend the colony. Each world has ground installations the enemy bombs. Lose them all and the run is over.
- Know your enemy (points for each):
- Drone — 10 — cheap swarm.
- Fighter — 100 — hunts you and strafes.
- Destroyer — 250 — bombs installations; turns on you if you get close.
- Mothership — 2500 — slow, heavily armoured, appears on a timer.
- Warp onward. Clear a planet and warp — a full cockpit cut-scene with engine spool, light-streaks, and re-entry — to the next world. The colonies are a finite, named cluster (Demeter, Tantalus, Boreas, Pandora, Vulcan, Vesper), cycled endlessly; your level climbs forever and is the mark of progression.
- Earn upgrades. As your level climbs you unlock combat perks, kept from then on: full six-degrees-of-freedom flight (level 3), an auto-targeting computer (6), a cloaking device (9), and a screen-clearing radial pulse (12).
- Cockpit dashboard. A cohesive instrument panel: flight computer readout, LED shield/throttle gauges, an artificial horizon, a chronometer/stardate, and a sweeping radar scope tracking surviving craft.
- Mission briefing & enemy codex. Reachable from the title screen — a scrolling back-story transmission and a rotating-3-D-model database of the alien fleet.
- High-score table. Name, stardate, score, and level, persisted across sessions.
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| Defending a colony as the swarm closes in. | Re-entry — warping in to the next world. |
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| The enemy codex: a rotating 3-D threat assessment. | Run's end, and the persistent high-score table. |
gmake build # universal .app via the shared jorvik-release pipeline
open .build/Strataris.app # fly| ← / → | steer (bank) |
| ↑ / ↓ | climb / dive |
| + / − | throttle |
| Space | fire |
| Z | cloaking device (once unlocked) |
| X | radial pulse (once unlocked) |
| R / Return | start · restart · warp (on the cleared-planet screen) |
| P | pause |
| M | mute |
| B / V | mission briefing / enemy intel (from the title) |
| Esc | back (close briefing/codex) |
| C / K | controller / keyboard setup |
| ⌘, | settings (audio, flight prefs, reset scores) |
| ⌘Q | quit |
Every key is reconfigurable from the Keyboard sheet (K); the bindings above are just the defaults.
A connected game controller (Xbox / DualShock / any Extended Gamepad) is detected automatically; the left stick steers/pitches and the discrete actions (fire, throttle, pause, warp, cloak, pulse) are rebindable from the controller sheet. Keyboard always works as a fallback.
Hidden feature flags
Off by default; opt in per machine with defaults write (relaunch to apply):
defaults write cc.jorviksoftware.Strataris ScreenshotOnSpace -bool true # F (or a rebindable gamepad button) saves a 1920×1080 PNG (4× nearest-neighbour) to the Desktop; Space stays fireExercises the renderer-independent game logic (AI intent, structures, return fire, scoring, persistence), the 2D canvas draws, the 6DOF flight model, and a best-effort GPU mesh render (skipped gracefully where there's no Metal device):
STRATARIS_SMOKE=1 ./.build/Strataris.app/Contents/MacOS/StratarisOn an M3 Max the GPU mesh frame (encode + readback) runs ~1.3 ms at 480×270 — the framebuffer is upscaled, nearest-neighbour and aspect-correct (letterboxed), to fill the window.
The world is a GPU triangle-mesh terrain composited with a hand-built 2D cockpit/HUD, then blit-upscaled nearest-neighbour for the pixelated look. See ARCHITECTURE.md for the rendering pipeline and a per-file source map.
If you enjoy Strataris, you can buy me a coffee ☕ — it keeps the Jorvik lights on.
Released into the public domain under The Unlicense — do whatever you like with it.
A Jorvik Software game.