Crystal Hammer

⏱️Overview

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

📂Sources

Located here.
List of my changes in changelog here.

📜History

I think I played M.A.R.S. when it was still active last, in 2011. I liked it instantly, it was a lot of fun and indeed ridiculous. 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, I realized that adding 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 since this is a great 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 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 in original project. I started with that. I had many ideas. The easiest for start was changing weapons and then adding new.

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.

⚠️Warning: work in progress 🚧

➡️Conclusions

I recomend M.A.R.S. as a cool C++ project, rather small and not too difficult. It should be good for beginners. In my fork, after my changes IMO code looks now more readable and recent.