News You Can Bruise for 2006 August 6

Permalink [Comments] (7) Sun Aug 06 2006 23:22 Keyboard Madness:

Sumana and I play a Tetris game where we use the same keyboard. It gave me an idea for the game that the most people could play using the same keyboard.

It's a spacewar type game with a separate spaceship for every key on the keyboard. When you press a key, that character shows up on the screen as a spaceship and joins the game. You control the spaceship with the corresponding key. Tapping the key rotates your ship clockwise, and holding it down accelerates.

The health of a spaceship is represented as a color from green to red. Accelerating drains your health, and so does colliding with another ship. You kill other spaceships by ramming them: this does some damage to you but more to the other ship. If your health goes to super-red your ship explodes.

In theory you can have as many players as there are keys on the keyboard, assuming they've all got long tentacles for fingers. In practice you will only have a few players, but each player can try to control multiple ships. Will you use ships as disposable missiles or try to set up pincer movements? Or just try to hit the other player's keys and mess up their navigation?

games

Comments:

Posted by Josh Myer at Mon Aug 07 2006 07:08

1/2/4 words, depending on your linguistic views: USB Keyboards.

Speaking of games: I don't know if you've mentioned Jay Is Games before, which is fairly popular with a few of my game-dork friends. It's all flash games, but they prove amusing, and his commentary is often worth reading.

Posted by Seth Schoen at Mon Aug 07 2006 13:22

In elementary school, I wrote a game pretty like this in Logo (but the Logo implementation that we had only allowed four turtles, so there were four turtles that would chase each other in a nontransitive "A beats B beats C beats D beats A" relationship). Four players could play by steering with particular keypairs. Whoever caught the appropriate other turtle first would win the round.

Posted by Jeremy Penner at Mon Aug 07 2006 14:04

This sounds cool, but I suspect you might run into problems with ghosting and masking.

Posted by Adam P. at Mon Aug 07 2006 17:00

But how do you win?

Posted by Leonard at Mon Aug 07 2006 17:04

Last spaceship standing wins.

Posted by mikepop at Mon Aug 07 2006 21:17

does your exploding spaceship inflict damage on nearby spaceships?

Posted by Leonard at Mon Aug 07 2006 23:05

Could be.

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