Escape From Earth

Play it in browser! https://jaychugstein.github.io/Escape-From-Earth/

"I messed with the wrong dairy farmer! We gotta get back to the mothership!" – Glorb

A 1-bit saucer flying game for the Arduboy FX (and FX-C). Fly Glorb's saucer left to right through one long course and into the waiting mothership. Touch anything and it's over.

By jaychugstein · MIT License · Requires the FX flash chip.

The course

The farm, a train tunnel through a mountain, a small town, a highway with a fireworks show, a carnival, downtown, the harbor, a cave, and Area 51, where the mothership waits with its bay open. Birds, planes, helicopters, balloons and a blimp fly along the top of the sky, so you can't just hug the ceiling. Get close to the mothership and its tractor beam pulls you in.

Controls

Button	Action
Left / Right	Tilt / steer the saucer
B – outer (right) button, hold	Propel. Tap it to hover
A – inner (left) button	Spin a quarter turn anticlockwise

The saucer flies like Pocket Rocket: point it where you want to go and propel.

After a crash or a win, the outer (right) button tries again and the inner (left) button goes back to the home screen.

Points

Distance	10 points a metre
Full 360	500
720 without touching propel	2,000
1080 without touching propel	5,000 (instead of the 720)
Upside down	120 a second
Escaping into the mothership	5,000
Quick escape	60 a second under 5 minutes
Saving propel	100 for every % of the run you didn't propel

Escape fast enough for a medal: gold under 70 seconds, silver under 100, bronze under 150.

Install

Arduboy FX / FX-C: load release/EscapeFromEarth.hex together with release/EscapeFromEarth-fxdata.bin, or the packaged release/EscapeFromEarth.arduboy, with any FX-aware uploader (for example the Arduboy Cart Builder, or the Arduboy-Python-Utilities uploader.py + fxdata-upload.py).

The game is built with ARDUBOY_NO_USB to save space. To upload a different sketch afterwards, press the reset button when the uploader asks.

Play in a browser

docs/ is a ready-to-host page that runs the real game in the Ardens emulator (MIT, by Peter Brown).

Building from source

The sketch is in EscapeFromEarth/ and needs the Arduboy2, ArduboyFX and ArduboyTones libraries.

• Arduino IDE / arduino-cli: open EscapeFromEarth/EscapeFromEarth.ino, select an Arduboy board (or Arduino Leonardo), compile and upload, then upload EscapeFromEarth/fxdata/fxdata.bin as the FX data.
• Command line: ./build.sh (edit the library paths at the top). Builds build/EscapeFromEarth.hex.

The program uses about 27.6 KB of the 28 KB available, so it is close to the limit. The release hex was built with avr-gcc 14.1; other compiler versions may produce a slightly larger file.

Where the art comes from

Every picture, the saucer at all 64 angles and the whole course are made by the Python scripts in art/ (numpy, scipy and Pillow). To rebuild them and repack the FX data and fxdata.h:

art/make_all.sh