AsteRisk

AsteRisk is a homebrew game by Brainpann where you play as miner in space collecting resources from asteroids. It was released on 02 Feb 2026 for the N64brew Game Jam 2025.

You can get the ROM from its download page, or from Drive. You can also find the source code here.

About AsteRisk

In AsteRisk, you play as a spaceship riding around a 2D plane. There’s red asteroids flying everywhere that you have to avoid, while the blue ones contain resources that you need to extract. Once you collect enough, you return to the home base in the centre to convert them into credits and fuel/repairs.

There’s also a drone (essentially a cpu-controlled 2nd player) that you can guide around to mine for you and repair your ship, as long as it has enough materials on board.

“Mining” consists of hovering your ship over one of the blue asteroids. In this state you are immune to incoming bad asteroids, but you need to be mindful of when the asteroid might be mined out, or if your ship still has some momentum.

A few minutes in, the speed of the asteroids increases dramatically, making them much harder to dodge. You can also raise your shields to deflect incoming asteroids in a pinch. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll have to manage fuel, repairs, minerals and your bot all at once if want to have a chance at surviving.

Credits

AsteRisk is credited to Brainpann. He used music by DavidKBD and font by Dan Zadorozny and Din Studio.

Review and conclusion

AsteRisk reminds me in a way of Escape Velocity, which I mentioned in my Space Battle project. It’s a space game where you move on an inertia-less plane, collecting resources by ‘boarding’ asteroids to sell back. It also bear a lot of similarity to the classic arcade Asteroids (obviously) since you have to dodge asteroids that are flying around, just that you can’t shoot them down.

There are is a (minor) bug where losing all your lives doesn’t really give you a game over, it just resets your score. The game doesn’t even place you back in the centre of the map, you just continue where you were. At first I thought that it glitched and that I had infinite lives.

The presentation is top-notch. the graphics have a very flat untextured feel to them, like a retro space game should. The music is well-fitting, keeping the tension up strong. The only thing that I feel is missing is the sound effects. There are some, but they’re drowned out by the music, and they’re so brief that you barely notice them with the exception being the asteroid collision. Having something to indicate asteroid pickup or dropoff for example would make it that much more complete.

I know it might sound like I have a lot to criticise, but it’s really just nitpicks at the end of the day. Do give AsteRisk a go, it’s a perfect example of homebrew gaming on the N64 done right.