Solo developer zakons has built the destructible boss hulls in AsterMaster, a Godot 4.6 roguelite from Zebka LTD, out of gaussian splats.
The game is a beat-driven roguelite shooter on a hex grid, in which every step, shot and dodge lands on the rhythm as the player digs into a dead mining asteroid. Each run is an expedition across a procedural mine graph with boss-gated descents, built around 14 weapon mods, 8 powerups, five bosses plus elites, and ore that players either bank at a station or carry deeper.
The source models are AI-generated GLB meshes from Meshy. A headless Blender script renders each from exact camera poses, so no COLMAP step is needed. A trainer of about 150 lines on gsplat's MCMCStrategy holds each boss and the player drone to a hard cap of 6,000 splats, finishing 6,000 steps at 400 by 400 pixels in 21 to 22 seconds on an RTX 3060. Color is direct RGB with no spherical harmonics.
A cel-shaded training set baked light bands that doubled up with the game's own shading, so the winning dataset uses soft diffuse lighting and the cel look is applied at runtime. GDGS 3.3.0 baked splat normals from a voxel proxy for Godot relighting in July, while AsterMaster snaps them from the source mesh after training. Part, emission, ambient occlusion and edge channels go into a custom SPL2 binary of about 0.5 MB per model.
A scene with a boss and a crowd holds a 4.6 to 5.4 ms median on the RTX 3060, with two viewports and 8x MSAA.
AsterMaster animates the hull damage in a single vertex shader, with the CPU setting uniforms and per-splat slot data. Hit types SHOT, BLAST, EPICENTER, MELEE and PIERCE shape damage differently, and a knocked-out splat either flies off as cooling debris or is pushed inward to form the dark floor of a crater. Repeated hits dig deeper procedural layers, a support graph tears off islands of up to 24 splats, and k-means++ chunks break away as rigid bodies.
Regular mobs went back to meshes because splat destruction does not read at 60 to 90 pixels. Splats remain on the drone, the five bosses, the rival and a hologram decoy trained at 1,800 splats. A custom superellipsoid rasterizer was abandoned at 0.7 seconds per training step and a loss of 0.0137 against 0.008 for gaussians.
The game's website shows the drone through Spark, World Labs' three.js renderer, from a 229 KB SPZ file. The free AsterMaster demo is out now on Steam, and the game is in Steam Next Fest from October 19 to 26 ahead of a November 17 release. The full write-up is available now on the AsterMaster devlog.
