RoTyx is a Galaga-style game in which the player controls a spinning object at the bottom of the screen and fires at waves of sprites whizzing around the top. As with all of Imp89's games, RoTyx has a distinctive look and feel, as well as a few unique features, such as the limited shot distance, which only travels about a third of the screen.

The game feels a bit like Galaxian with the handicap of a limited shot distance. Everything flails around quickly. So, positioning the rotating cannon at the bottom underneath some rocketing down objects is a bad idea. The solution here is, according to Youtuber Yesteryear: ”try to second-guess when to dive out of the way. It gets a lot easier when some multiple-shot power-ups have been acquired, but the shot distance remains limited.” At the end of a short review, he says that he would like to play a full version: „This one has the potential to be a lot more fun.”

rotYx (1996) is a Shoot’em up for the mouse. imp89 wanted to create a simple vertical shoot ’em up that could be played using only the mouse. His goal was to find out whether shoot ’em ups were just as easy to control using the standard controls of the new VGA computers—which had good mouse interfaces—as they were using keyboard keys or even joysticks.

The game’s name refers to the idea of making the manually rendered enemies appear visually as if they were rotating 3D objects (see Bauer 2025g). The roTyx icon shows a “final boss” standing on the ground and casting a shadow. One technical challenge was using sine curves for the attack patterns. To address this, imp89 also developed an editor in which players could draw attack curves with the mouse and then apply them to the enemies (see: https://www.gamelab.ch/?p=12699 )