A browserless Swift/AppKit starfighter game built around the Mac trackpad. SpriteKit supplies the native Metal-backed render loop; GameController and AppKit provide input; AVFoundation supplies immediate hit/round audio.

cd macos/menu-fighter-native
swift run trackpad-fighter

Put two tiny, high-contrast triangle starfighters over the macOS desktop in a transparent, chromeless overlay. Ships rotate, thrust, fire, and wrap around the screen while sparse drifting asteroids threaten both players and break under fire. The overlay closes itself after the round ends.

swift run trackpad-fighter --desktop

Install the fleet-only four-corner trackpad watcher:

./install.sh

Touch all four trackpad corners at once. A strong accent-color flash immediately covers every display and launches the encounter; lifting the fingers cannot cancel startup. Sparse star streaks then warp from the desktop center toward all four corners and brake to a stop as a short ascending beep phrase plays. There is no separate intro screen. Once the stars stop, the live scene unlocks directly into play with no login step.

Controls:

Trackpad (Player 1): touch with one finger to highlight the ship. Every finger movement immediately points and thrusts the ship in that direction; lifting stops adding force while momentum continues. A short stationary tap fires. Two-finger acceleration is intentionally disabled for now. Player 1 begins at screen center, and the ship palette follows the current macOS system accent color.
All game marks use the same cursor-like line stack: black outer edge, light keyline, and system-accent center line. There is no separate reticle, tether, stored charge, or release animation.
Active thrust sheds short line particles from the rear of the triangle. They inherit ship momentum and enter SpriteKit's shared gravity field with damping and a short lifetime.
Player 1: A/D rotate, W thrust, F light shot, G heavy shot.
Player 2: left/right arrows rotate, up arrow thrust, / light shot, . heavy shot.
Controllers: d-pad/stick, A jump, X light, Y heavy.
The desktop round captures mouse, trackpad, and keyboard input across every display so clicks, drags, scrolling, and hover state never reach apps or Prox rocks underneath it. The standard cursor stays hidden until the round ends; Escape quits immediately. In windowed mode, Escape opens the local pause card and Return starts/resets the fight.

Round lifetime logs #

Every watcher launch and fight round appends structured JSON lines to:

~/.local/share/trackpad-fighter/rounds.jsonl

Events share process, launch, scene, and round IDs and include monotonic elapsed times. The trace starts before the scene is built, records duplicate scene-attach attempts, intro/reset/combat events, attacks and hits, and finishes with the round outcome and process teardown. A crash or forced kill deliberately leaves a round_started entry without round_finished, so incomplete lifetimes remain discoverable.

# Follow new events.
tail -f ~/.local/share/trackpad-fighter/rounds.jsonl | jq .

# Reconstruct one round in order.
jq --arg id '<roundId>' 'select(.roundId == $id)' \
  ~/.local/share/trackpad-fighter/rounds.jsonl