DESCRIPTION:
* 30 Seconds or Less can best be described as Crazy Taxi meets pizza delivery. It's a frantic 2D top-down driving flash game. Drive the red station wagon to deliver pizzas to the customers and earn tips and time bonuses in the process. Watch out--crashing will "damage" your pizza and slow you down. Even worse, if the fat pizza-craving helicopter guy catches up to you, you'll lose the pizza and waste plenty of time.
DURATION:
* 30 Seconds or Less can best be described as Crazy Taxi meets pizza delivery. It's a frantic 2D top-down driving flash game. Drive the red station wagon to deliver pizzas to the customers and earn tips and time bonuses in the process. Watch out--crashing will "damage" your pizza and slow you down. Even worse, if the fat pizza-craving helicopter guy catches up to you, you'll lose the pizza and waste plenty of time.
DURATION:
* Two weeks.
TEAM SIZE:
* Five people--two artists, one producer/designer, and me and one other programmer.
PRELUDE:
* This is the very first of FIEA's rapid prototype games. Me and four strangers whom I've hardly had time to meet are working on a new Flash game. It's also my first time working in Flash so that was a tad bit challenging for me at first.
PERSONAL GOALS / ACHIEVEMENTS:
* Maybe if you had seen the Super Sprint page, you'd notice a common thread--a 2D car that can drift around corners at high speed. This was a "prototype" for Super Sprint's car handling. Use the handbrake to turn at a sharper angle. Also as the car drifts, smoke is emitted from the tires--another feature that made its way into Super Sprint.
* Worked on collision with the other buildings. If the car's pixel detection hits a stationary object, determine where the object is from the car and have the car bounce backwards with a speed loss. The car's keen ability to do a 180 in the reverse direction is strange but seeing as we were getting the hang of Flash and I was experimenting with pixel detection, it looked great at the time.
* Not only did I place the building entities in the world at certain coordinates to resemble a real town, I also had to make the world scroll with respect to car positioned in the center of the screen. Since the world needs to be moved rather than the car, this change's the game programming completely. If a building is too far from the car's "coordinates" in the world (as opposed to the screen, which is always dead center), then don't draw it to save frames. Nevertheless, the scrolling world works but is still a bit laggy at times. There's always a better way to do these things (different programming method, use less detailed sprites) but, like I said before, we were noobs at the time.
* Implemented the radar. The green arrow circles the car pointing in the direction to the customer or the pizza shop. The closer you get to the target, the larger the arrow gets. It resembles the green compass from Crazy Taxi. There's some fancy trigonometry at work here but visually, it works well.
* Programmed the helicopter enemy. He only pursues the car when you're carrying a pizza. He follows your every move. Also programmed the yellow traffic cars which drive along a set path indefinitely--hit them and you lose all your speed.
* Worked on game balancing. Like any arcade racer, the longer you go on one life, the harder it gets. First, the time bonuses awarded for pizza delivery has to take into account the distance traveled--the farther away, the more time you get. Also, the car's speed increments for each dollar made, ramping up the thrills and the difficulty at a pace that keeps the game from being too short or too long.
MEDIA:
Gameplay Trailer.
LINKS:
