Astrodude (0.3)

This was a game I entered into the Intel Netbook Competition, hosted by The Game Creators. I won 1st place.

The theme of the competition was to make a game suitable for the new Intel Netbook range, which were basically mini laptops. I decided to make a car physics based dodging game, where you can use the trackpad to 'swipe' the car to dodge obstacles.

I did all the programming for this game using C++ with the DarkGDK graphics library, and all the artwork in Photoshop. The biggest challenge I faced when making this game was handling the deformation of the terrain. I had to develop a system to efficiently generate (and regenerate) the collision mesh at runtime based on the explosions that deformed the surface. This was quite a challenge because I wasn't aware this had been done before and the algorithm was called Marching Squares, and so I developed the algorithm on my own from scratch.

The idea with this competition was that the game would later be published on Intel's "App Up" store (now discontinued). In preparing this game for publishing I discovered that due to NPOT scaling issues, my game wouldn't function correctly on some devices. Accounting for this issue was quite difficult using the DarkGDK graphics API, and I wanted to include some more features for the commercially published version, and so I decided to re-write the game from scratch and release it as version 1.0.

You can download the final competition entry from HERE.

Judges - "Have everything you understand about physics tested to the maximum in this 2D physics-based driving game. It's a tried and tested formula but with a twist. Set in an extra-terrestrial environment with just enough gravity to keep you planet-bound, the camera view is fixed to the orientation of your dune buggy. Rather than lose your vehicle and starting again when you overturn it, your whole world is turned upside down too. You'll have to wrestle with recovering your vehicle whilst baffled by working out the physical aspects in a upturned world.

Bob Duffy, our Intel judge, reports "Astrodude scored the highest across the board. Well done graphics, good game play for a netbook...'track pad' swipe for a boost is brilliant.""