Omaski

A skiing game for Omarchy in the spirit of the 1991 classic SkiFree, rebuilt to run natively on Hyprland — with all-original artwork in a chunky, minimalist fantasy-console style, so the whole plugin is freely redistributable.

Click the skier in the bar and the game opens as a true 1:1 square window, in exactly the position and at exactly the size Omarchy's single-window square aspect ratio layout would give it.

No Wine. No browser. No emulator. No network. Just Quickshell and QML.

TIME 0:00:44.25
DIST   551M
SPEED  15M/S
STYLE   282

The look: a tiny screen, blown up

Everything renders onto a small virtual screen of roughly 220 logical pixels — drawn with the 16-colour PICO-8 palette and a 3x5 pixel font — then integer-scales up to the window with no filtering. Big square pixels, warm paper-white snow, flat colours.

That virtual screen is also why the game is smooth. The whole frame is painted onto one canvas at a fixed 30 fps; nothing in the scene graph is created or destroyed while you ski. (Version 2 rebuilt a list of QML image objects on every tick, which is why its trees teleported instead of scrolling. Version 3 repaints one item.)

The artwork is original — and yours to redistribute

Every one of the 82 sprites in assets/sprites/ — the skier in his red beanie, the triangle-stacked trees, the big dead snags, the rainbow ramp, the chairlift, the barking dog, the deer (and what is left of one), the snowboarders, the crash starburst and every frame of the Abominable Snow Monster's table manners — was drawn for this project, at 8 pixels per metre. The pixel grids live in tools/make-sprites.py (pure Python standard library), which renders the whole set:

python3 tools/make-sprites.py     # regenerate assets/sprites/

Nothing is extracted from, traced over, or downloaded out of anyone else's game. The sprites are MIT-licensed with the rest of the plugin, which is what lets Omaski ship complete on the plugin marketplace with no first-run downloads.

Faithfulness

The simulation is a from-scratch implementation of the classic's rules:

One deliberate departure from the classic: there are no course signs and no slalom modes. It is one mode — down the hill.

Controls

Land a backflip mid-rotation and you will eat snow, exactly as you deserve.

Window geometry

The launcher does not hardcode a size. It reads the focused monitor from hyprctl monitors, converts the physical size to logical pixels using the monitor scale, subtracts the reserved bar area, the configured gaps_out and the window border, and takes the largest square that fits. On a 2256×1504 display at 1.6× scale with a 30 px bar and 10 px gaps that works out to 886 × 886 at (262, 42) — the same numbers Hyprland's own single_window_aspect_ratio = { 1, 1 } layout produces, verified by measurement.

The rules are applied through hl.exec_cmd, so they affect only this one process and nothing in your Hyprland config is touched.

Two details worth knowing, both learned the hard way:

• The window asks for its square size but does not lock minimumSize to maximumSize. Pinning them makes the compositor destroy the window if it ever gets tiled.
• Omarchy tags every window default-opacity and then applies 0.985 0.96 to whatever still carries the tag, so opaque = true alone is not enough — the later opacity rule wins and the snow goes muddy. Omaski drops the tag as well, which is the documented opt-out, and the snowfield renders solid.

Tests

The simulation is plain JavaScript, so it runs headless under node. The suite covers momentum (push-off, top speed, the dead stop at full sideways, crashes zeroing it), the crash freeze and key-to-get-up rule, mogul rattles versus ramp launches (including the standing-on-a-bump regression), jump and backflip scoring, deer bursts, barking dogs, world wrapping, field determinism, status formatting, the sprite catalog, and both halves of the monster rule — that he eats you at normal speed and that F gets you away.

node test/test-run.mjs

72 checks, all green.

There is also a debug hook for exercising the late game without skiing two kilometres by hand:

# start already at 1990 m, so the monster turns up almost immediately
OMASKI_DEBUG_START=1990 ./launch.sh

# the same, without the launcher's window placement
OMASKI_DEBUG_START=1990 quickshell -p ./game

Install

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/TyRichards/omarchy-omaski --enable

Then add the Omaski widget to your bar, or launch it from the app list (tools/install-app-entry.sh registers the desktop entry).

Installing by hand instead: clone this repository into ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/io.github.tyrichards.omaski, then

omarchy plugin validate .
omarchy plugin enable io.github.tyrichards.omaski

Uninstall

omarchy plugin remove io.github.tyrichards.omaski

Remove the optional app-list entry with rm ~/.local/share/applications/omaski.desktop ~/.local/share/icons/hicolor/256x256/apps/omaski.png.

Saving any file under ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/ hot-reloads the plugin.

Besides the bar icon, the game can be opened (or focused, if it is already running) from a script or keybinding:

omarchy shell omaski launch

Credit

Omaski is a from-scratch homage to SkiFree, written by Chris Pirih in 1991. He still hosts the original, for free, at https://ski.ihoc.net/ — go play it, read the story of how it came to be, and buy the man a T-shirt.

The presentation tips its hat to the fantasy-console scene — PICO-8 and the tiny games made for it — while every asset here is drawn from scratch.

This plugin shares no code or artwork with SkiFree and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Chris Pirih or Microsoft. What it borrows is the idea — the slope, the ramps, and the appetite of the thing that lives past 2000 metres — and game mechanics are ideas.

License

MIT, code and artwork alike. See LICENSE.