Space War: The New Frontier

Recently, I suddenly realized that creating a game similar to Spacewar, or rather Star Control, would be pretty simple in GameMaker Studio.

Unfortunately (wink), I discovered that it now has a built-in 2-D rigid-body physics engine.  Cue lots of experimentation:

 Fig 1: Plasma beam fired while spaceship is rotating.

Fig 2: Ship rotating because of recoil from firing mass driver.

 Fig 3: Experimenting with graphics effects.