Homegazer

Homegazer is a submarine game in orbit. Something shot your station, killed your crew, and believes it succeeded. You wake up alone in the silence of a broken station. Earth hanging huge in the cupola window, easy to see, but hard to reach

Every two minutes your orbit swings through its line of sight. Everything your station emits makes you easier to find — every closed breaker, every warm module, every transmission home. The breaker board is your control: run bright and work fast, or go DARK, vanish, and watch the stars while you drift past danger, but making no progress. Spend power to see, but be warned the target this paints on your back. A running scope paints the incoming strikes straight onto your orbit dial, making them easier to address. Listening to comms might give you hints on how to get home, but takes power that makes you more visible.

• NASA procedure, not cosmic horror. Checklists are your tutorial, quest log, and last surviving crewmate.
• The hum is your heat signature. You can hear how visible you are. Silence is a resource; learn to spend it — and when you finally go dark, you’ll hear what your own noise was hiding, passing overhead.
• Every job is done by hand. Transmitting is a lock held through a closing window. A repair is a seal held against a drifting needle. The scope is a crosshair you steer; the radio tunes by touch. Menus are for stations that still have a crew.
• Fail forward. Blackouts and consequences, not death screens. Every fault is repairable, every repair costs parts, and everything on the station can be gutted for parts if you’re willing to live without it.
• Zero-G movement that rewards touch. Hand-over-hand on rails, momentum kicks, and a station layout you learn with your hands.
• Get six confirmations through and a recovery vehicle launches. The last four orbits are the hardest thing in the game — and the loudest thing you’ll ever do.

Made solo in 14 days for the GoedWare Game Jam (theme: Star Gazing).

Controls

• Thrust: WASD or arrows (8-way) · Shift: air brake
• Space: grab a rail / launch off one — rails are how you really travel
• J: kick — redirect your momentum off a passing rail at speed
• ENTER: work the console you’re latched to · hold it for the heavy levers (DARK, salvage, sleep)
• W/S double as the board cursor while latched · M: mute
• Hold ESC to skip the prologue (Q if your browser eats ESC)

Credits

• By Jason Freidman
• Music: N91music — “Free Atmospheric Assets” (n91music.itch.io)
• SFX: Pixabay (universfield) — hull impact and resonance samples
• Earth globe: Pixabay (GDJ)
• Cover font: Speedy by GraphicSauce, Space Mono by Colophon Foundry
• Everything else drawn and synthesised in-engine
• Built with Excalibur.js
• Coded with the help of Claude