Three people. One garage. Five million pilots.
Star Jolt is made by BeardyBird, a three-person studio in Sydney. This page covers who we are, how the game was built, and the decisions that shaped it.
Studio spotlight: BeardyBird
Star Jolt started as a game jam prototype Tomasz built in a weekend in 2023. The prototype had one star, one ship, and a slingshot that felt wrong in exactly the right way. Friends could not put it down, which is the only market research we ever did.
Eighteen months later the game shipped on Android with nine sectors, a custom gravity engine rebuilt four times, and a soundtrack written in the same garage the code came from. Rin paints every livery herself; Mara writes every note.
The studio's rule list is short and printed above the desk: no ads, no energy timers, no pay-to-win. Revenue comes from cosmetics, merch, and the services on this portal. The rule list has never been edited.
Star Jolt Australia exists because a third of the player base lives in our timezone. This portal is where the AU community, services, and press materials live.
Physics tuned by hand, not by formula
The pull field around each star is a custom solver tuned over months of playtesting. It is a hand-tuned approximation, built to reward commitment the moment you release.
- Capture radius: the cone narrows with star mass. Pulsars grab harder and forgive less.
- Centripetal assist: a hidden force keeps your arc smooth instead of physically pure.
- Exit vector: release angle plus stored energy sets your exit speed; the maths rewards depth.
Wide cone, slow pull, generous release window. Where you learn the game.
Huge cone, moderate pull. Easy to enter, expensive to escape.
Razor-thin cone, violent pull. The window is half the normal width.
Pilots fly in twelve languages
Typefaces that respect the script
Menu and HUD fonts ship with full Cyrillic, Latin, CJK, and Hangul glyph coverage. No fallback-font boxes, no broken glyphs in leaderboards.
Community translations
Players volunteer proofreading passes through the community card program. Spot an error and the fix usually ships in the next patch.
STAR JOLT
A tribute to the coin-op era
Star Jolt is built like a 1984 arcade cabinet: instant start, one mechanic, brutal difficulty curve, and a leaderboard that turns strangers into rivals. The difference is it lives in your pocket and costs nothing.
The coin-op era
One credit, one try, the whole arcade watching the counter tick over.
The pocket arcade
Unlimited credits, the same pressure, and a board that never sleeps.
Phone and tablet, one profile
Google Play Games sign-in syncs your pilot profile across devices: scores, skins, and season progress follow the account, not the handset. Start a run on your phone, review it on your tablet.
- Auto sign-in: Play Games profile connects on first launch, no account creation screen.
- Cloud backup: cosmetics, achievements, and career stats live server-side.
- Official XP: achievements feed your Google Play Games level.
Sync runs over Google's infrastructure. We never see your account credentials.
Fast game, cool phone
Star Jolt renders a busy scene on a deliberately lean pipeline. An hour of play on a flagship adds about as much heat as fifteen minutes of video streaming.
Measured on a Pixel 8 at 25°C ambient, 120 Hz mode, screen at 60 percent brightness.
The 60 Hz saver toggle
One switch under Battery Settings caps the frame rate and extends session length by roughly 40 percent. Your scores still count the same.
120 Hz, verified in game
Bars show relative frame pacing stability per 10-second window. The dip at 40s is the Omega star storm under full particle load.
120 Hz support
Uncapped rendering where the display allows it.
Cold start under 1.5s
Icon press to flyable state on mid-range hardware.
Under 100 MB
The entire install stays smaller than a photo burst.
What just shipped
- Omega sector and three new hazards
- Pickup economy rework
- Bluetooth audio pitch cue fix
- Eleven stability fixes
Where the game goes next
Co-op ghosts
In dev
Sector editor
Prototype
New boss sectors
Concept
Season 7 theme
Voting open
Comfort is a first-class setting
Every screen and effect can be tuned. Colour vision modes, shake reduction, haptic strength, and sensitivity all live on one panel.
The comfort panel
Shake reduction, colour schemes, and flash dimming are all toggles, never baked in.
Common questions about the studio
The garage door is open
Join the community, commission a skin, run a tournament, or just download the game and beat our scores.