I Made an Arcade Game. It's Called 7helm.

I made a game. It's called 7helm. Said out loud it is sevenhelm, which is also where it lives:
sevenhelm.com.

Press PLAY and you are flying. Red circles come at you. You shoot them. More come, faster.
That's the game right now, and I like it more than I expected to.

How to play

• WASD to move. The ship points where it thrusts, so it drifts. You have to fly it.
• Arrow keys to aim and fire. The gun turns on its own, separate from the ship.
• SHIFT to boost. Boost burns fuel. It's how you get out of trouble and how you run dry.
• E for the grappling hook. It costs nothing. Swing around a planet, reel in, drag
  something off course.

On a phone it's touch. There's nothing to download.

Why an arcade

I grew up on arcades. You walked up, put in a quarter, and you were playing. Nobody asked for
your email. If you did well you put in three letters and that was your name on the board.

So that's all 7helm asks for. Three initials, if you want. No account, no ads, no cookies.

There's one high score board, and everyone shares it. When your run ends, the game sends the
recording of your controls, and the server plays the whole run back itself before your score
goes up. If the replay doesn't reach the same score, it doesn't count. I didn't want the
simplest thing on the site to be the easiest thing to cheat.

I do record how runs go: which mode, how long it lasted, where it ended. That's so I can make
the game better, and it's only me reading it. The
privacy page lists every single thing, and there's a button
there to delete all of it.

What's behind the curtain

There is a lot more game than what PLAY shows you. There's a battle royale called the Fall,
twelve ships and a closing ring. There's a tower defence campaign across seven stations, from
the Moon out to Titan. Those live under ARCADE LABS on the start screen. They're
experiments. Some of them will change a lot, and some will go away.

I pulled them back on purpose. I kept adding and the front door turned into a menu of six games
and nobody knew where to start. So now there's one button. The rest waits until it's ready.

It's early

I've made a lot of small games before, the single-file kind collected in
Pixel Vault. 7helm is bigger than
those, and it's the same habit I wrote about in
why I build creative technology: make the
whole thing from code and see how far it goes.

It's hard, and parts of it are rough. I'm building it in small pieces, mostly at night, with
AI agents doing a lot of the typing while I do the deciding and the playing
(agent mode is how that works).

If you try it, tell me how far you got. What wave. Whether you figured out the hook. That's
the most useful thing anyone can tell me right now.

Play 7helm