A vertical-scrolling shooter for Android. Every sprite is vector math rasterized at boot; every sound is synthesized sample by sample at runtime — no art files, no audio files, no third-party dependencies.
Field Manual · Controls, Loadout & Guardian Roster
NULL SECTOR inherits 100% rendered geometric graphics and 100% synthesizer-generated sounds from the 1980s. Inspired by a love for classic space shooters, that were “bullet hell” before there was a term for it. This grew into a deep love for doing the impossible (like finally developing a video game, just like we dreamed of when we were wee-little engineers) that has served us well all our lives.
The game features an adaptive system that learns from how well you are doing to present constant challenge and provide engaging replay. It's wired into the game theme of evil AI/machine intelligence that is out to end humanity, and represented as AI Aggression in the game. This isn't simply a difficulty slider — it's an opponent that measures your comfort and removes it! The most counter-intuitive rule: holding the trigger down makes the game harder. Shooting with discipline is a real tactic.
Finally, we take our privacy very seriously and that means we take yours seriously too. We've included a unique “Bragging Rights” system that shares codes via text/SMS, email, and instant messaging services so you can compete with your friends and loved ones completely offline. No registration. No web account. We won't ever know when you went grocery shopping. Read the full privacy policy.
So, have a read, and get started — Everything you fight with is original: ten special chips, the enemy roster, and twelve Guardian bosses — one per sector, each built to be the right answer to some loadout and the wrong answer to others. Fly through every sector the system throws at you, and the run ends on a graded Pilot Rank.
We hope you enjoy playing our love letter to the 1980s arcade space shooter as much as we enjoyed making it.
Drag anywhere on the playfield to fly. The main gun fires itself — there's no fire button, because a fire button would cost you the thumb that's dodging.
Touch is relative, not absolute. Touching the screen grabs the ship where it is and moves it by your finger's delta, rather than teleporting it under your fingertip — absolute positioning would make every touch a possible instant death. The ship also rides slightly above your fingertip, eased in as you move, so your own thumb never covers the thing you're trying to keep alive.
Because the drag is relative, you choose the gap between your finger and the ship the moment you touch down. Hold below the ship, at whatever distance suits you, and it stays there — letting you watch it dodge instead of hiding it under your thumb.
| Action | Input |
|---|---|
| Fly | Drag anywhere on the playfield |
| Main gun | Always firing — no button |
| Special chip | Hold the circular button, bottom-right |
| Safety / hold fire | Tap the circular button, bottom-left. 15 to 45 seconds without firing earns a ship (shorter if your recent lives were short). While the safety is on, the Special is locked: a press fires nothing, spends no charge or one-shot weapon, and shows a SAFETY ON notice |
| Timer on ship (option) | Off by default; turn it on under Options, Accessibility & Media. A small ring on the ship's hitbox counts a running special down (pink and blinking in its last 1.5 seconds) and refills amber while it recharges, with the seconds left beside it |
| Pause | Double-tap the progress bar along the bottom edge |
| Surrender a run | Triple-tap the progress bar |
Stylus vs. finger: a stylus gives tighter control but makes it easier to jab the Safety or Special by accident; a finger is looser but harder to fat-finger those buttons. NULL SECTOR is built for one-handed play, including for players with limb differences.
The pause menu: double-tapping the progress bar freezes the run and opens a menu — Resume, How to Play (this manual), HUD Overview (the guided tour, played over your paused run), Bragging Rights (view only mid-run) and Medals. Each screen's Back button returns you to the menu with the run exactly as you left it. Double-tap the progress bar again, or tap Resume, to carry on.
There's also a guided HUD tour in-game — it plays once automatically right after the opening cinematic, and it's replayable anytime from the title screen's How To Play → HUD Overview.
Five signals feed one hidden scalar, heat (0–1), surfaced to you as the ten-tick AI Aggression column on the left edge:
| Signal | Rank | What it's asking |
|---|---|---|
| Kill rate | 1 | Are you clearing what's sent at you? |
| Firepower | 2 | How upgraded are you? |
| Survival | 3 | How long since you died? |
| Fire rate | 4 | How much are you spamming the trigger? |
| Near misses | 5 | How comfortable are you inside danger? |
The escalation is asymmetric on purpose: heat climbs on a long time constant so you earn it gradually, but collapses the instant you die, with a short grace window afterward that suppresses it entirely — so the difficulty reads as an opponent easing off, not as punishment. A slow-rising floor also stops you from hiding in a corner and shooting nothing.
At tier 7 the gauge turns alarm magenta and the system starts dispatching Hunters — the one enemy that steers toward you continuously. Grazing a bolt closely (without getting hit) eases aggression back down; hugging either edge of the screen is never a safe refuge, since edge strikes fire there too.
Waves also follow your gun. Aggression picks one of four bands of formations, from gentle single-type shapes (band 0) to mixed waves with no single answer (band 3), but a weak gun is never sent the hardest ones. Gun tier 0 sees band 1 at most, tiers 1 to 3 see band 2 at most, and only a tier 4 gun is sent band 3. Waves that arrive as two formations at once, at the very top of the gauge, also wait for tier 4; no gun is ever sent three at once unless you turn on Extra Third Wave. That option sits under DIFFICULTY & CHALLENGE beside the AI aggression scale, unlocks with it, and is off by default. It only matters at AI aggression 10, the one level that calls for a third formation, and then only for a tier 4 gun. Measured against a ship that lines up every shot, this keeps a wave's clear time at about 60 to 75% of the gap before the next wave. Losing a gun tier to a death eases the waves off, and rebuilding the gun brings them back.
Three lives. No shield, no armor — one hit ends a life, with brief invulnerability just after respawn.
| Tier | Barrels | Damage per shot |
|---|---|---|
| T0 | 1 | Base damage |
| T1 | 2 | Same damage per shot |
| T2 | 2 | +35% |
| T3 | 3 | +35% |
| T4 | 4 (outer pair angled) | +55% |
Hit points are whole numbers, so the extra damage is paid out over time: a +35% shot does 1 on most hits and 2 every few, and over any run of hits it averages exactly 1.35 (1.55 at T4). The fraction is kept on the enemy between hits, so foes with three or more hit points die proportionally faster at the higher tiers.
Extra lives come from three places: reaching the sector's maximum score (right-edge NEXT SHIP column) banks one bonus ship per sector (370,000 points in sector 1, 765,000 in sectors 2–12, 850,000 in the final sector), and holding fire — safety on, no main-gun shots; the Special is locked while it is on — earns another, over and over. The wait is 15 to 45 seconds and follows how long your last three lives lasted: an average life of 40 seconds or less pays out in 15, 60 seconds in 20, 100 seconds in 35, and 160 seconds or more (or no deaths yet) takes the full 45. Seconds held add up across stretches, and firing a shot pauses the count without erasing it. A green ring around the Safety button shows the progress. Extend pickups, maxed-chip overflow and Battle Salvage drops still grant lives as before.
The first three ships a sector hands out for holding fire cost nothing. From the fourth on, the sector's guardian notices: the screen freezes on a taunt that shows it knows you are there but not where, a 3-2-1 follows, and each of those ships sends one Stalker and one to five Mites to find you. The count starts again every sector.
Terms used throughout every chip's numbers below.
Collect your held chip again to level it up, to a max of 4 — a different chip swaps in one level lower than the one you drop. The outer ring on the chip button shows charge, 0–100, filled by kills and by pickups.
On the inner ring: gold counts down a burst or active effect; a dimmed sweep counts down a trigger chip's rest period.
A widening fan of pellets, straight up your own lane.
Press once: spends 4 charge, locks in an auto-fire burst. More pellets and more damage each, the higher the level. Every pellet stops at its first hit — no pierce, no splash.
| L1 | 3 pellets · base damage · 0.20s cadence |
| L2 | 5 pellets · +20% damage · 0.18s cadence |
| L3 | 7 pellets · +40% damage · 0.15s cadence |
| L4 | 9 pellets · +60% damage · 0.13s cadence |
A piercing beam that stops for nothing in its path.
Press once: spends 9 charge, locks in an auto-fire burst. Passes through every enemy in its path, never stopping. Hits harder and fires faster the more you level it.
| L1 | 3.2 damage · fires every 0.34s |
| L2 | 4.6 damage · fires every 0.29s |
| L3 | 6.1 damage · fires every 0.25s |
| L4 | 7.5 damage · fires every 0.20s |
One shot forward, two more guarding your rear flanks.
Press once: spends 8 charge, locks in an auto-fire burst. Every shot deals your current main-gun damage, not its own — leveling buys range and fire rate, never more damage. Rear shots fire behind each shoulder, angled outward.
| L1 | 0.9s range · fires every 0.42s |
| L2 | 1.1s range · fires every 0.37s |
| L3 | 1.3s range · fires every 0.31s |
| L4 | 1.5s range · fires every 0.26s |
Spins up orbiting drones that fight at your side.
Press once: spends 14 charge for the whole active window. Spawns one drone per level, evenly spaced around your ship; each auto-fires on its own, every 0.3s, for free. Can't be re-triggered early — wait out the active window.
| L1 | 1 drone · 1.0 damage · active 7.0s |
| L2 | 2 drones · 1.4 damage · active 9.7s |
| L3 | 3 drones · 1.8 damage · active 12.3s |
| L4 | 4 drones · 2.2 damage · active 15.0s |
A field that turns enemy bolts into your own ammo.
Press once: spends 12 charge for the whole active window. Any enemy bolt entering the field is destroyed and reborn as a homing shard aimed at the nearest enemy — rewards flying toward danger instead of away from it. Once it drops it rests for as long as it just ran; full charge doesn't skip the wait.
| L1 | 24 radius · 1.2 shard damage · lasts 3.5s |
| L2 | 31 radius · 1.7 shard damage · lasts 4.8s |
| L3 | 37 radius · 2.1 shard damage · lasts 6.2s |
| L4 | 44 radius · 2.6 shard damage · lasts 7.5s |
A discharge that hops player → foe → foe → foe.
Press once: spends 10 charge, locks in an auto-fire burst. Each hop seeks the nearest foe it hasn't hit this shot; a hop that finds nothing nearby simply ends the chain. A boss in range adds a bonus hop at about 1.5× the normal reach and 1.4× the damage.
| L1 | 2 links · 1.6 damage · 52 reach |
| L2 | 3 links · 2.2 damage · 63 reach |
| L3 | 4 links · 2.8 damage · 73 reach |
| L4 | 6 links · 3.4 damage · 84 reach |
A charged bolt that detonates in a splash radius.
Press once: spends 8 charge, locks in an auto-fire burst. Every bolt damages all enemies caught in its splash. L3 and up fire a second bolt, mirrored off the nose, at no extra cost.
| L1 | 1 bolt · 2.2 damage · 40 splash |
| L2 | 1 bolt · 2.8 damage · 53 splash |
| L3 | 2 bolts · 3.4 damage · 67 splash |
| L4 | 2 bolts · 4.0 damage · 80 splash |
An overdrive that slows the world and arms your main gun.
Press once: spends 90 charge for the whole active window. Everything else slows down — your ship doesn't. The chip fires nothing itself; it multiplies your main gun's own damage for the duration. Once it drops it rests for as long as it just ran; full charge doesn't skip the wait.
| L1 | 1.5× damage · world at 55% speed · 3.0s |
| L2 | 1.9× damage · world at 48% speed · 4.2s |
| L3 | 2.2× damage · world at 42% speed · 5.3s |
| L4 | 2.6× damage · world at 35% speed · 6.5s |
Two more chips latch on once the game has been beaten once. Both are Ultimate mode: one press, once per sector, no re-triggering no matter how much charge comes back.
A kite-shaped ward that circles the ship.
Press once: spends a full charge bar (100). Up / right / down / left, each ±22.5°, are fully immune — bullets are destroyed, contact deals no damage to you. The four diagonal gaps between them get no protection at all. A Blockade's hedgehogs are the one exception: with the ward up you pass through them at any angle, and they take its contact damage.
| L1 | 55u reach · 1.0 contact damage · 15s |
| L2 | 70u reach · 1.7 contact damage · 30s |
| L3 | 85u reach · 2.3 contact damage · 45s |
| L4 | 100u reach · 3.0 contact damage · 60s |
A captured singularity weapon — what took the 3rd Fleet without a trace.
Charges on kills: reach 55% of the sector's kills and it latches ready. Press once ready: drops a well on the thickest enemy cluster on screen, pulls everything nearby in, and ticks tidal damage — steeper near the core — before collapsing into one burst, bigger the more it consumed. Bosses aren't pulled in but still take ticks and a cut of the burst.
| L1 | 90u radius · 2.0 base damage · 1.2s pull |
| L2 | 110u radius · 2.8 base damage · 1.5s pull |
| L3 | 130u radius · 3.7 base damage · 1.7s pull |
| L4 | 150u radius · 4.5 base damage · 2.0s pull |
Twenty Threats: nine core units designed to keep you focused and eleven designed to take you out. AI Aggression adjustments based on how you are playing keep the pressure on! Tap any card to watch it move.
One boss per sector, twelve in total. Every Guardian has a baseline mechanic that's always on, and a showcase chip it's specifically built to counter — hold that chip against it and the fight escalates further.
Ghost Bonus. Sector guardians (sectors 1 to 12, not the final boss) pay up to three ships to a pilot who keeps the guardian in phase 1 and dodges it with the cloak on. The timer only runs while the guardian is fully on screen, still above 66% health, and you are cloaked: 30 seconds of that earns one ship, three at most. Firing pauses the timer without losing it. The moment the guardian reaches phase 2, any ships you have not yet earned are lost for that fight. While it is available the green ring on the Safety button counts the 30 seconds and a GHOST BONUS readout under the guardian's health bar shows how many you have, and normal hold-fire ships and their taunts are switched off for the fight.
No escorts — commits fully to aimed fire.
Counters: Tri-Star. Tri-Star held: focuses into a fast burst.
A drifting fog drains charge on contact.
Counters: Surge. Charge banked high: the fog hunts you.
A rotating weak seam — elsewhere deals 35%.
Counters: Vulcan Fan. Vulcan Fan held: the seam narrows further.
No escorts — shoulders waves away from it.
Counters: Chain Arc. Chain Arc held: push radius grows wider.
A jitter throws off a straight-line shot.
Counters: Lance. Lance held: the jitter gets faster, wider.
Telegraphs, then lunges to melee range.
Counters: Reflector. Reflector up: it lunges much more often.
Shielded most of the fight, brief openings.
Counters: Drone Wing. Drone Wing up: the opening shrinks.
Blinks around — slow splash hits empty air.
Counters: Buster Beam. Buster Beam in flight: it blinks faster.
Bulwark's armor seam, plus a magnetic pull.
Counters: Vulcan Fan + Lance. Bends in-flight Lance shots off-line.
Flicker's blink, plus a radial nova burst.
Counters: Buster Beam + Reflector. Reflector up: the nova comes out denser.
Warden's focus fire, plus a gravitic pulse.
Counters: Tri-Star + Drone Wing. Drone Wing up: the pulse bleeds charge.
Shielded like Mirage, taxes Vulcan Fan too.
Counters: Vulcan Fan + Drone Wing. Drone Wing up: the opening shrinks too.
Awarded once, on the victory screen, after all thirteen sectors fall. Blends three pillars, equally weighted:
| Tier | Rank |
|---|---|
| 0 | Signal Pilot |
| 1 | Seasoned Pilot |
| 2 | Veteran Pilot |
| 3 | Ace Pilot |
| 4 | Legend Pilot |
| 5 | Mythic Pilot |
The top two tiers also need your weakest pillar to clear its own floor — one strong pillar can't carry two weak ones alone. Check your medal count any time from Bragging Rights → View Medals.
Medals are a career record, not a run record: once a badge is earned it stays lit on this install for good. Open the MEDALS screen from the pause menu (double-tap the progress bar) or from Bragging Rights → View Medals. Tap any badge for its citation; use the PAGE button at the bottom left to step through the three pages.
Sixty badges make up the case, and every one of them counts toward Full Case and the Medals pillar of Pilot Rank. Your medals also travel inside every Bragging Rights code you share.
Twelve decorations in order of precedence, NS-01 (most senior) to NS-12. Some summarise the badges on page 2 — Perfect Score is all thirteen Sector Max Score badges — and some are earned in a single moment of play.
Awarded when every badge in the case is lit: sixty of sixty, every sector and every other decoration in this order, Perfect 10 and Guns Only included.
It cannot be taken in a single run, and nothing else in this order asks for as much.
Awarded when all thirteen sectors stand at their top score tier.
The sectors need not be taken in one run, but each must be carried to tier three on its own terms — a partial sector counts for nothing here.
Awarded for carrying one run from the first sector to the thirteenth without losing a ship.
There is no partial credit and no second chance inside a run: deathless from the first sector to the last, or it is nothing.
Awarded for carrying a run through the entire game, sector one to sector thirteen.
NULL SECTOR has no continues, so a run is a single credit by definition — this decoration says the credit was spent all the way to the end.
Awarded when all thirteen sectors have banked the top bonus-life payout.
It rewards the player who clears well rather than the player who clears fast — the one decoration a cautious run earns faster than a brilliant one.
Awarded when the main gun and a support chip both stand at their final tier.
The case tracks the two as separate lifetime singles; this decoration is issued only when both are held at once.
Awarded for taking all three of a sector's badges — score, clean and ships — in a single pass through it.
Any of the thirteen will do, but the three must come together; a sector finished across two runs does not count.
Awarded for destroying a sector boss without taking a single hit.
The approach doesn't count against it — the record opens when the boss does, and closes when it is gone.
Awarded on first reaching the deepest sector, cleared or not.
It marks distance travelled rather than outcome, and is the only decoration in this order that survives a failed run.
Awarded on clearing the first sector.
It's the first thing the case ever records, the last decoration in order of precedence, and the only one every player holds.
Awarded for pushing the machine intelligence's own aggression reading to its maximum, tier ten, at least once in a run.
Really ticking off the machine intelligence and living long enough to give it a one-finger salute.
Awarded for clearing a sector without the special weapon firing even once.
Holding a chip in reserve does not cost it — only the trigger does. The main gun alone is enough, or it is not earned.
The badges the decorations are built from. The four per-sector rows each hold thirteen badges, one per sector, lit the first time that sector meets the condition.
Awarded the first time each sector is cleared — one badge per sector, thirteen in total.
Separate from the case above: no score tier, no deathless streak, no condition beyond reaching that sector's Guardian and bringing it down.
Awarded when a sector is cleared without losing a single ship — one badge per sector, thirteen in total.
The same record the case above already keeps per sector, surfaced here on its own. Not the same as Deathless, which still asks for all thirteen back to back in one run.
Awarded the first time the main gun reaches its final tier, four barrels, in any run.
Kept for life once earned. Fully Forged is the stricter decoration: the gun and a chip at their limit at the same time.
Awarded the first time a support chip reaches level four, its final level, in any run.
Any chip counts, and it is kept for life. Fully Forged still asks for the main gun at its final tier at the same time.
Awarded when a sector is cleared after its score has reached the top tier — one badge per sector, thirteen in total.
The target is set separately for sector one, sectors two to twelve and the finale. All thirteen together earn Perfect Score.
Awarded when a sector is cleared having banked the top bonus-ship payout — one badge per sector, thirteen in total.
Reach all three score tiers of the Next Ship gauge in one sector. All thirteen together earn Max Extra Ships.
The third page holds your Ribbons, the running totals kept beside the medals. They have a section of their own: Ribbons.
Medals are awarded once. Ribbons are the other half of the record: running totals that count what you do, over and over, for as long as the game is installed. Every ribbon carries up to six stars, and each star it earns is a rung on a ladder of counts. There are 31 ribbons: one for every enemy type you can destroy, one for every special weapon you can fire, and Armory.
Find them on the third page of the MEDALS screen. Tap a ribbon for its card: how many you have, where the next star is, and the whole ladder. Counts never reset, are kept on the device with your medals, and do not count towards Full Case or Pilot Rank.
The number of stars is how many rungs of its ladder you have climbed, and the metal of the stars and the border is the highest rung you have reached. Six stars means the ladder is done.
| Stars | Metal |
|---|---|
| 1 star | Bronze |
| 2 stars | Silver |
| 3 stars | Gold |
| 4 stars | Void iron |
| 5 stars | Amethyst |
| 6 stars | Null white |
Kill ribbons have solid coloured ends; weapon ribbons have barred ends, so the two families can be told apart at a glance. Each ribbon is coloured for what it counts: the Scout is orange, the Mite hot pink, the Echo teal, and so on.
One for each of the twenty enemy types. A ribbon counts the enemies of that type you have destroyed, over every run, and all twenty share one ladder.
| Ribbon | What it counts | Stars at |
|---|---|---|
| Kill ribbons (one per enemy type, 20) | Enemies of that type destroyed | 100 / 500 / 1,000 / 10,000 / 50,000 / 100,000 |
The top stars on the rarer enemies are long hauls on purpose. A Hunter, for example, turns up about a hundred times in a full run, so its last star is a matter of years, not weeks.
One for each of the ten special weapons, plus Armory. A weapon ribbon counts how many times you have used that chip, and the ladder depends on how the chip works.
| Ribbon | What it counts | Stars at |
|---|---|---|
| Vulcan Fan, Lance, Tri-Star, Chain Arc, Buster Beam | Times fired | 100 / 500 / 1,000 / 5,000 / 10,000 / 25,000 |
| Drone Wing, Reflector, Surge | Times activated | 25 / 100 / 250 / 500 / 1,000 / 2,500 |
| Ward, Hawking (a ribbon each) | Times used; each can fire once per sector, so 13 a run at most | 1 / 5 / 13 / 50 / 100 / 250 |
| Armory | Each of the eight starting special weapons used at least once (Ward and Hawking are not needed) | one star |
A shot refused because the safety is on is not a use. Ward and Hawking unlock when you first beat the game, and their ribbons stay dim until you have used them.
Bragging Rights codes were made for texting a friend. The Bragging Rights League puts them on one board: post your code, fly for a team and take on a league, all while the game itself stays offline.
In the game, open Bragging Rights and tap your score's code to copy it.
Paste it on the league page. The code is verified, and your first post gives you a private pilot PIN that keeps your scores together.
Teams hold up to six pilots and score the sum of their top three. Captains can enter public leagues, or private ones with an invite code.
No account and no email: a code holds only your initials, score, sector, time, enemy types faced and medal count. See the privacy policy.