Crystal Hammer

⏱️Overview

In 2025 I started my own fork of “M.A.R.S a ridiculous shooter”. A fun packed, 2D spaceship flying game with weapons and bots.
I added new features including: 16 weapons, asteroids, turrets, few gameplay elements, ship controls, more options and scalable GUI.

📂Sources

Located here.
List of my changes in changelog here.

ToDo: screens gallery, video..

📜History

I played M.A.R.S. when it was still active last, in 2011 (back then we were very busy with Stunt Rally). I liked it instantly, it was a lot of fun and indeed ridiculous, hilarious to play.
It reminded me of my oldest space games for 2 players, from around 1995 or so. Screens visible on this image on right, top under “2 player space games”, more info about that here. My small games were also ridiculous, first even hard to play. Later were easier and more fun, while still having cyclic borders (e.g. you fly out right, you appear on left), something normal for me for 2D space games.

📝Motivation

While I was recently developing Cave Express (after I stopped Stunt Rally development), I realized that adding new gameplay elements in it is rather complex, due to its mutiplayer server-client architecture. I then remebered about M.A.R.S., that its code was much easier, and thought I could add some things and change that project too.

I checked out its sources again, and it got back to me why I didn’t do this years ago. I really didn’t like how the code looked like, but regardless I now developed it. I was asking myself a few times “who writes code like this”, obviously a retorical question, authors are known. Also this is a FOSS project, it’s not for complaining, but about what can you do to improve it. After a while I did also change the code formatting, probably a lot.

The project was abandoned since about 10 years by original authors. Later it was moved to github. Had a few contributions by others. I have also noticed 2 recent forks. I saw there were also memory issues (leaks) and people fixing that. Not sure if completely, but I did also include some of those fixes in my fork.

🔍Details

Nothing was changed in game or gameplay since the original project. I started with that. I had many ideas. The easiest for start was changing weapons and then adding new.
Since spcaceship was controlled by only 3 keys (turn left, right and accelerate) it made flying funny, but also quite awkward and unprecise. I then added accelerating sideways, backward and boost. Then also turning and aiming by mouse pointer, which IMO improved flying and aiming a lot.

While learning the source code I also discovered few unfinished things, and realized that maps could have different scale rather easily. Fortunately code was written well, so with my changes, bots (AI players) mostly still play well. By the way of adding scale and different map sizes, I added plenty of other options on GUI sliders, which were easy.

By the way of developing I was also changing formatting, cleaning the code, making it somewhat easier to extend, in game settings and GUI layouts. I made GUI scalable (and fixed that one issue). It was one of those things that needed changes everywhere in GUI code and much testing after too. All because GUI wasn’t written like that from start.

Probably the best thing in M.A.R.S. is its particle system, and the fact that each particle can be affected by gravity. It has its limits of course, I think on my PC game slows down (below 60 Fps) with above 60 k particles. It only has sphere collision shapes. Maybe it could be parallelized on CPU. But after seing collison code, I don’t think for GPU, it has to many conditions etc. It would also be difficult to improve, and maybe even not needed. It looks good and detailed already. Still, a recent, well made GPU particles system can handle million(s) of particles. I’m almost sure using Box2D library for collisions would give much worse performance (on CPU), but it would make it easy to have different collision shapes.

➡️Conclusions

M.A.R.S. is a small but very fun driven game. But I guess it’s likely old and not popular. I think I made it even more fun, by adding new game features and more options for maps etc, making it playable for longer. Surely I have more things for it in my ToDo, which I may even not start implementing, well it’s called “to do” for a reason.

I also recomend M.A.R.S. as a cool C++ project, rather small and not too difficult. It should be okay for beginners, to tinker, change, learn and practice while having fun. In my fork with my changes IMO code looks more readable and recent now. After all M.A.R.S. was originally made in 2010-11, and C++ syntax has improved a lot since then. Well at least it was and still is for me a great way of learning programming, in (FOSS) games. Of course learning from tutorials, books is more efficient and doing own projects. But at some point everyone has to learn from code written by others and be able to deal with that.