2 months ago
- BELTRUNNER is a game built on the Jinks engine, a lightweight game-engine and interactive development environment, with ~1,300 lines of code.
- The game starts as a faithful Asteroids clone in Stage 1, then reveals a countdown race through numbered gates, blending familiar mechanics with new objectives.
- Design philosophy: teach the chassis first (Asteroids movement), then recontextualise it into a timed race where time is the only resource.
- Sixteen waves (4 acts of 4) follow a 'Nintendo Way' structure: each act introduces a new gate behavior (elliptical, directional, spinning, combined) and lets it bed in over multiple waves.
- Gameplay is deterministic: every random element uses a single seeded stream, making layouts learnable and fair for replays and tuning.
- Discoverable secrets include a hidden 'clover' rock sequence (inspired by Bomb Jack) that rewards players with a jackpot power-up, and an unlockable Asteroids ancestor in attract mode.
- Power-ups are collectible tokens in the field (Pang-style): TIME, INVINCIBLE, STOP, EXTRA, and WARP, each with specific effects and strategic use.
- The game forced system improvements: better vector graphics, real torus wrapping, polygon and ellipse colliders, and elastic deflection physics.
- Platform-agnostic core runs on multiple systems (Linux, Wii, Dreamcast, etc.) with the same code; only the shell changes.
- The game ends after 16 waves, with high scores tied to the economy, and attract mode continuously simulates the world.