Plan for Jeremy Alessi

Game in a plane trip ...

There's always game in a day, game in a month, game in a whatever contests. On the way back from IGC I thought it'd be cool to do a game in a plane trip. The initial game I began on was called Whipped. My idea was for the player to control an array of spinning whips to destroy intruders. The players would have to balance out the length of their whips and the speed. You could make one whip longer ... but all the others would get smaller ... or you could make them all faster ... and they'd all grow shorter and vice versa. It seemed cool but it was a bit complex and I don't think it was much fun. Part of my inspiration on the plane ride home was Geometry Wars on the Xbox 360. I was trying to figure out the cool warping vector graphics. I figured a cool way to do it on my end was to use points in 3D space with projected 2D lines on the screen. This way I could have the cool rotation and warping effects that are fairly easy to get in 3D affect the 2D graphics.

Anyway, I veered off on a tangent as I'm prone to do when I just sit down and codesketch. What I came up with was more like a standard shooter ... because I was just in the mood to do that. I didn't want anything super complex ... I just decided I'd rather blow stuff up for once! So here's what my game in a plane trip turned out to be:



Download It

Admittedly, I didn't finish it just on the plane ride ... although I could have if A) I slept less and B) My laptop battery would last for a few hours at least! I think the graphics are pretty trippy and cool so I'm kind of proud of them. It's really just a codesketch as I said before but I've got some ideas that could make this pretty cool

A) Turn it into a community based multiplayer shooter, where players can design their own vector graphics ships and weapons. Give it a little RPG side where they have only so many points to designate for shield, speed, weapons, etc... and then let them compete to see who can blast the most baddies in a time limit, without a time limit, and even let them battle each other.

B) I also hit me that this stuff makes for a cool screen saver ... which got me thinking. Is there room in this world for Play Savers? Basically, really simple games that double as screen savers. Only thing is that you'd have to press escape to get out instead of just moving the mouse or something.