STARLIFT

A rocket-lander rescue game for CHGame. Colonists are stranded across eight worlds. Fly your lander on Newtonian physics, set down gently beside them, and carry them home to the base pad at the far end of each stage before the flying saucers beam them away.

Trailers: 30 seconds, 15 seconds.

Controls

Button
LEFT / RIGHT	Tilt the lander (on the ground: turn the guns round)
A	Main engine (hold; it takes a moment to spool up)
DOWN, twice	Landing gear down (it folds up by itself after take-off)
B	Rotary cannon and laser
UP, held	Charge shot: let go for three plasma balls, forwards, backwards and down
START	Pause menu (resume, difficulty, save, quit)
START held 3 s	Back to the CHGame menu

How to play

• Fly. Gravity pulls, the engine pushes along the hull, and nothing brakes for you. Each world has its own gravity (shown on the stage card, from 0.14 G to 0.64 G), and some have wind: watch the windsocks and the weather. Colonists aboard make the lander heavier.

• Land. Gear down, level, and slowly. Too fast, too tilted, gear up or on a slope, and the lander is lost.

• Rescue. Colonists wave as you fly over. Land beside them (not on them!) and they run aboard: eight seats. Fly them to the base pad at the far end of the stage: they walk into the base, and the pad refuels and repairs the lander. Each stage has a quota of colonists to bring home; miss it and the world must be tried again.

• Pick-ups. Land beside a crate to load it: repair kits, fuel cells, colony supplies (deliver them to the base) and now and then an engine part that makes the lander stronger for the rest of the game.

• The scanner at the top shows the whole stage: colonists, enemies, items, the base. An arrow at the screen's edge points to the next job.

• Takeaway. Shoot down a saucer while its order is coming up from the takeaway, or just bump it, and the bag drops: a speeder bike races out, grabs it and tosses it into the lander's flip-top lid, a little cut-scene to watch. Stingers go for the speeder, so cover it. Bring the food home for a FEAST FIESTA: fireworks, points and a treat from that world's food (an extra lander, a better engine or a mended hull).

• Cows. Bump a saucer (it costs nothing: the ships clang apart) and now and then a cow tumbles out and grazes for the rest of the stage. Land beside one for a milk run: it tops up the tank, then the cow climbs aboard; bring it home for a bonus. Saucers beam cows back up: shoot one in time to save its cow. Every cow still grazing at the end of a stage is worth a bonus.

• Difficulty. Easy, Normal or Hard, on the title and pause menus: the hull (8, 5 or 3 hits), enemy numbers and fire, fuel, landing and the quota. On Easy the hull mends itself and extra repair kits lie along the way.

Dangers

• UFOs hover over colonists and lift them up in shimmering green tractor beams. A saucer takes up to five, getting slower as it fills, then flies them to the aliens' collector at the far end of the stage. Shoot it down and its captives bail out on jet packs, and you can catch them in mid-air.
• Stingers spit plasma, mines drift towards you, turrets fire flak.
• Bosses guard every fourth stage, over the aliens' collector: a big armoured saucer that follows you and fires (cannon rounds do nothing to it). Shoot it open to free everyone it took.
• Sandworms roam under the desert's sand. The ground heaves above them: get the colonists out before one rises, or shoot it as it surfaces to drive it back down, or hover over it and haul it out on the rope: win the tug of war and drop it into the collector.

The worlds

Sixteen stages over eight worlds, each with its own sky, scenery, weather, wildlife and takeaway:

World
The Moon	The Earth overhead, the flag and the old descent stage, footprints in the dust. Burgers.
Sabulon	A deep desert of dunes and buried temples, sandstorms and sandworms. Noodles.
Cryo	A polar outpost under the aurora, domes and masts, snow blown by the wind. Ice cream.
Verda	A lost temple in the jungle under a banded gas giant, rain and lightning. Pizza.
Vulcan	Alien pylons among volcanoes, a red sun, ash and embers. Hot dogs.
Titan	A ring station under a ringed planet, methane drizzle. Fish and chips.
Prism	A crystal sanctum under twin suns, glinting air. Sushi.
Zorg	An alien city under two moons, acid rain. Glorp pies.

The weather changes from game to game: a stage may be clear, or a storm.

The SD card

STARLIFT keeps its music, its big pictures, its worlds and its words in STARLIFT.DAT on the SD card: copy it to the card's root, and Starlift.CHG to GAMES\GAMES. Without the file the game asks for the card.

Saving

START opens the pause menu: SAVE GAME keeps the stage, score and landers; the title offers CONTINUE. The high score, the difficulty and the music and effects volumes (OPTIONS) are kept too. The game keeps a single save page: a power cut in the middle of a save loses that save.

Building

python tools/make_card.py        # sprites, songs, worlds, words -> out/card/STARLIFT.DAT and CHStarlift/CardIndex.h
./cl build                       # the game (flash <= 50,432 B, RAM <= 18,416 B)
./cl run CHStarlift/tools/scripts/look.txt out/look --card out/card/STARLIFT.DAT

The simulator needs the card file (--card). Test switches (-D): SL_BOT an autopilot, SL_START=n start at stage n, SL_STORM the worst weather, SL_TRACE a log.

Developer notes

• CHStarlift/CHStarlift.ino is the game; Synth.cpp the sound (three FM voices, drums, an engine rumble and an effects voice that can warble like a 1950s ray gun); Card.cpp reads STARLIFT.DAT through a small block cache, only between gfx_wait() and the flush.
• The scenery: a sky, three parallax layers (1/8, 1/4, 1/2 of the camera) drawn column by column, each stopping where the next begins, with buildings from the card on them, then the ground in textured bands.
• tools/: make_sprites.py (with structures.py, bases.py, plants.py, skies.py, life.py), make_music.py, messages.txt, and make_card.py, which also holds the eight worlds' definitions.

Credits

Game, code, art and music by Jadflat, made with Claude (Anthropic). The pixel art was drawn as grids and rendered with the pixel-art-gen Claude skill.

Built on CHGame, Copyright 2026 Kevin Bates (bateske): the framework is vendored in chgame/ (see chgame/VENDORED.md, chgame/NOTICE and chgame/LICENSE). Each folder there carries its own licence, mostly Apache-2.0 and MIT. The sound output's timer setup follows chgame-soundtracks (BSD 3-Clause): see THIRD-PARTY.md.

Licence

The game's own code, art and music: MIT (see LICENSE). chgame/: Kevin Bates's, under the licences in its folders.