Space Invaders 👾

Space Invaders is the least talked-about of CrasH Utils's five games, but it's part of the same story as the rest: after the pack's Snake Game post blew up on r/StableDiffusion in October 2025, the author went on a genuine game-shipping spree, and Space Invaders landed in the CrasH Utils/Games menu alongside Tetris, Dino Game and DOOM as part of that same burst.

What it is

A wave-based arcade shooter, straight out of the 1978 original's playbook - rows of descending enemies, a player ship that moves along the bottom, and you shooting your way through wave after wave. It's a genuine standalone game, not a tech demo. Worth noting it didn't get its own viral Reddit post the way Snake and DOOM did - it just quietly showed up in the same release, the one game in the set that arrived without a dedicated origin story attached to it.

How it works

SpaceInvadersGame has no inputs and no outputs - like the rest of this pack's games, it's a pure UI widget that renders a playable canvas directly on the node, completely disconnected from your actual image or video pipeline. Add it to your canvas, click in, and play while your queue processes in the background.

Controls: arrow keys to move, Space to shoot.

Installing it

ComfyUI Manager: search "CrasH Utils" and install. Manual:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes/
git clone https://github.com/chrish-slingshot/CrasHUtils.git

Restart ComfyUI, then find "Space Invaders" under CrasH Utils/Games. No dependencies, nothing to download.

Common issues

Arrow keys are panning the ComfyUI canvas instead of moving my ship. Click the game canvas first - like every game in this pack, it needs keyboard focus before it responds. Until then, your keypresses are going to ComfyUI's own canvas navigation, not the game.

Game is eating keystrokes meant for a prompt box elsewhere. Click outside the node to release focus once you're done playing.

Running two game nodes at once and only one responds to my keys. That's expected - keyboard focus can only belong to one widget at a time. Click into whichever game you actually want to control right now; the other stays paused on whatever state it was last in.

Concerned about GPU impact. None - this runs entirely as browser-side canvas JavaScript, sharing no resources with the actual render pipeline. Your generation queue proceeds at full speed regardless of how many waves you've cleared.

Progress resets on page reload. Expected - like the rest of this pack's games, state lives in your browser tab and isn't persisted server-side, so a ComfyUI page refresh starts a fresh game.

Wondering if this is worth installing over just Snake or Tetris. If you're only grabbing one game node, Snake or Tetris are the better-known picks - but if you're already installing CrasH Utils for the LoRA loaders or the resolution nodes, Space Invaders comes along for free, so there's no real reason not to add it too.