Rocket

Rocket game was small project made early 2005. I was really happy to do it since it was really different compared to other single player games I've done. Whole game had two pictures (loading screen and menu) but otherwise all the graphics were based on vectors and polygons. So just this one time I didn't make just server and client coding, but I was also responsible of how actual game looks like :-)

Basic idea of the game was to fly in caves with rocket while gravity was pulling rocket down. Player can only turn the rocket and use thruster to move forward. I've always liked this kind of games and these were quite popular at the time when I was in school. I have warm memories of TurboRaketti, Wings and Auts :-)

In this game player had to pick up boxes and bring them to landing platforms. More boxes player was carrying, heavier the ship was. To make things harder, there was mines floating around, cannons mounted to walls and black holes sucking player in. Player was able to shoot obstacles, use teleports and pick up extra items like fuel and health.

To add some replay value to tracks, player was able to choose between 5 different space ships and they all had their own Top Lists. There was one basic, average ship. Cargo ship was big and clumsy but had big cargo hold so it was able to pick up and carry more boxes at once. Sport ship was fast and agile, but with small fuel tank and cargo hold. Stealth ship was able to turn invisible so that cannons didn't shoot it, but player wasn't able to shoot either while invisible. Fighter ship had extra firepower to quickly get rid of obstacles and through breaking walls. Strategies player had to use were very different depending on ship.

Free with vectors

Since game was using only vectors, it allowed to zoom in and out as much as player wanted. Also good example of flexibility is that right side small map is actually exactly same component as main game area. Map just had small overlay that was showing location of player, and boxes that player is supposed to pick up, as flashing dots.

Zoomed in close to player, in normal applet size:

Since changing screen size was easy, game also had fullscreen mode. If browser just allowed applets to go to full screen. Here is an example of fullscreen where game view is also zoomed out so far that almost whole level is visible at once. Click for full view:

Editor

Game also included full editor so that Playforia users were able to make their own tracks, publish them and let other people to play them.

Unfortunately, same thing happened than with many other games that allow users to make content. There was some really great tracks, but still 95% of tracks were nearly impossible "lets put million cannons here and thousand mines there" type of tracks. These were practically unplayable even though editor did some sanity check before letting users to publish track.

We added voting system that allowed other players to give ratings to tracks and once a week best track was changed to be one of the official public tracks. Unfortunately there wasn't enough players in this game to make voting work. It was easy to just ask all your friends to give good ratings to your own tracks and many times it was enough to make track pass.

Eventually, this game was removed from Playforia because too high maintenance compared to amount of players this game had. But personally I'm still very happy with this project and it was certainly fun to do. I learned a lot about vectors, vertices, polygons and collision detection.

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