Atomis Development Blog

Tilt: a Listing-Ship Tetris, Now Native on Mac & Windows

Published on June 14, 2026

Sometimes you just want to build a game. Tilt ("Schlagseite") is a small arcade game I wrote in jdBasic over a few evenings: it is Tetris with one nasty twist. Stack your cargo too far to one side and the ship gets a list - the whole deck capsizes 90 degrees toward the heavy side, the crates slide onto the new floor, and you have to keep playing on a board that just rotated under you.

Tilt - a rotating-deck Tetris built in jdBasic

The twist that makes it

A balance meter at the bottom shows how badly you are listing. Cross the line while it is armed and the deck tips - but the cargo does not vanish, it falls onto the new floor and closes gaps. Survive the chaos, line up rows, and the board settles. After a tilt it stays calm for a random handful of drops, then arms again. Add bombs, lasers, gold crates, an anchor, a joker, collectible stars, combos, original chiptune music and a stormy night that rolls in when your stack climbs too high.

Built and compiled in jdBasic

The whole thing is one jdBasic file using the GFX layer (SDL3 under the hood) for drawing and the built-in sequencer for sound. The fun part: jdBasic's native backend compiles that script straight to a standalone executable via its embedded LLVM-18 toolchain. No interpreter, no runtime to install - a real binary plus a small runtime library, ready to ship.

Self-contained on Mac and Windows

Windows: a small folder with a code-signed tilt.exe and its DLLs. Unzip, double-click, play - nothing to install, and a proper publisher name instead of an "unknown publisher" scare.

Mac (Apple Silicon): everything is bundled into a single self-contained Tilt.app - SDL is linked statically, the rest of the libraries ride inside the bundle. No Homebrew, no dependencies. One honest catch: it is not notarized with an Apple Developer ID, so the very first launch needs a one-time approval - the exact two-line steps are in the included Anleitung.txt.

Download for Windows Download for Mac (Apple Silicon)

Controls

Make the top 5 and you get to punch in three letters for the highscore table, arcade style. Have fun, and watch your balance.

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