This game has been Greenlit by the Community!

sphereFACE is a retro-3D vector shooter inspired by Asteroids, wrapped around the inside of a sphere.

An unashamedly abstract shooter that ranges from slow, strategic sniping to frantic fast-paced rock-dodging action, with roguelike elements of exploration, progression, discovery and sudden death!


You can look freely around each sphere using mouselook, or your controller, or your keyboard, or even in virtual reality using your Oculus Rift.

Success depends on mastering spherical flight dynamics in what is effectively curved 2D space - easy to pick up, but difficult to master! Are you up to the challenge?


Asteroids break apart "realistically" along fracture lines, forming shards and boulders when hit. The result of an impact on an asteroid depends on your choice of weapon, the angle and speed. However, you have to plan your demolition carefully to avoid flying debris - just one hit can kill.


Of course there's much more than just asteroids! Destroy the obstacles in each sphere to unlock the portals leading out of it, and navigate through a procedurally generated 3D maze of tunnels and spheres.


Pick up and unlock a variety of cool and quirky weapons. Each has its own strategy and learning curve, but the true sphereFACE master must learn to use them in concert with each other. Below are a few of the unique weapons you might find out in the asteroid fields:

• spreadGUN
  
• gaussRIFLE
  
• guidedROCKETS
  
• spaceMINES
  
• fuelBURST

There will be many more weapons and powerups in the finished game, but we wouldn't want to spoil the surprise just yet!


Every weapon can be upgraded progressively to alter its effects, improve its performance and bring it to the next level. Choose your favourite weapon to upgrade, but be careful - the upgrade pods are fragile. If you're too trigger-happy, you might destroy them before you can collect them!

And sometimes it seems as if it's almost like they don't want to be picked up...

What, you didn't think you'd just be shooting at passive rocks your entire career? Stray too deep into the hyperspace tunnel network and you might meet something that shoots back... but we don't want to spoil the plot for you!

The game features entirely original music by four awesome professional musicians - HODSON, Waveland, DorianSRed and Skin Walker. Each sphere has its own music track, and all audio is 3D positional with real speed-of-sound delay, doppler and realistic head shadow, which is made possible by our unique built-from-scratch HDR sound engine. A lot of effort is focused on sound design.

You can hear a preview of the soundtrack, streamed on our bandcamp: https://voxelstorm.bandcamp.com/album/sphereface-demo-ost

We don't use off-the-shelf engines, such as Unity, for any of our games - we write our own each time from scratch, which gives us the versatility to create exactly the gameplay experience we want with no limitations. It also means our graphics engines are highly optimised and run smoothly - even on that old netbook! The engine for sphereFACE is completely custom, built on OpenGL.

The sound engine is fully HDR, with multi-track synchronous "deck" crossfade capability, and full support for EBU R128 2011. Again, totally original in-house software.

We develop and test simultaneously on Windows, Linux and OS X - everything we make is always truly cross-platform, just on principle. We're also committed to using open source tools, and we use GCC, MinGW-W64 and Code::Blocks IDE to build our software.

We also love VR, and sphereFACE alpha is already playable perfectly with the Oculus Rift.

The basic game engine and gameplay are already working well, and extensively tested - we've showed off the Oculus Rift version of the alpha build at several gaming exhibitions already. Now we'd like to take this game to the next stage and evolve it into a really fun gameplay experience.

We plan to add many more weapons, and a progression enabling you to collect them. We want to add procedural world layout, in a roguelike style, so no two games will be the same. We'll be adding a lot of unique and interesting enemies, as well as static obstacles and other interesting space junk - and we want to make sure the gameplay is absolutely perfectly balanced. Finally, we have a dark and twisted story progression in mind, where after a while it turns out that you may after all be... ah, but that would be telling! Suffice to say, not all is as it seems...