I’ll do it on monday!

Okay just kidding.  It’s going public-alpha — that’s right PUBLIC-ALPHA a term I coin for most of my projects.  Essentially I only have myself to test my games, so I get some of my programming buddies to test out the game in the early stages.  Most notably without any real graphics.  So it’s called public alpha because some of the public can play it in it’s early alpha type stages.  But still not released to the general public.  Anyhoo, it is FINALLY a game. :-)

Only time will tell if people find it fun, or frustrating.  Things to note, it’s keyboard only at the moment, although mouse support is planned for in the near future.  Basically you need to move your small craft (okay big white block) around the screen, using left and right arrows to rotate.  You need to capture stars (smaller colored blocks), by releasing the catcher with the left ctrl key (a little light blue box will come out, this is the catcher).  You can essentially just leave it open, and touch the stars with the catcher.  But beware, some stars are attracted to the energy your ship emenates and will move towards you like really fast and stuff.  Also your fuel will be used up whenever you thrust (up arrow) or whenever the catcher is open.  If it dips below 50% then the fuel will replenish from your star energy.  So that’s it, you’re essentially trying to get 100% energy to get to the next level.  Potential energy is shown to guage your progress.  So you know if you need anymore stars.  Scoring is handled this wise, 2 points for every star in the catcher, 100 bonus points for catching shooting stars in mid-air.  You also get bonus points depending on how many stars you managed to capture… number of stars times 10.  Well I think that’s about it.  When you hit one star with the catcher, a new one will be generated elsewhere, so watch out for rogue stars that seem to pop in from nowhere.

Umm that’s about it.  Please let me know about the gameplay — NOT ABOUT THE GRAPHICS — this is purposely left as is, because I want to get the gameplay solid.  Is it fun?  Is it too hard?  Is there not enough to keep your interest.  What would? (and don’t say cool graphics :-)

Click on the screenshot to download the game.  Please note zipped up it’s 1 meg, and unzipped it’s more like 5, but this is because I am using the popcap opensource framework  on debug mode (btw I have nothing to do with Popcap, but this is their opensource framework).

While I strive to make sure my system is virus free, I would like to advise you to run a virus scanner on anything you download be it from my page or any place else.  You are using this program at your own risk — I will try to resolve problems but I can’t guarantee anything.

Click to download:

Please test it, and if the graphics are just too minimal for your tastes, then just don’t download it.

Keith

This entry was posted on Friday, October 6th, 2006 at 2:03 pm and is filed under Game Projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.