NWA Beta

NWA is (supposed to be) a fast paced 2-4 players space combat game.

Each player controls a ship in the gravity well of a dark star. Newtonian-ish physics apply.

How to Play

Each ship has an equal amount of energy capacity. Energy is depleted by activating the thruster and firing torpedoes. It is replenished by the dark star proximity.

The keyboard controls for each ship are:

Yellow (Irregular Apocalypse)

• ↑ = Thruster
• ↓ = Fire
• ← = Rotate Anticlockwise
• → = Rotate Clockwise
• SHIFT = Detonate Torpedoes

Blue (Prosthetic Conscience)

• S = Thruster
• X = Fire
• Z = Rotate Anticlockwise
• C = Rotate Clockwise
• A = Detonate Torpedoes

Green (Revisionist)

• R = Thruster
• F = Fire
• D = Rotate Anticlockwise
• G = Rotate Clockwise
• E = Detonate Torpedoes

Purple (The Ends Of Invention)

• I = Thruster
• K = Fire
• J = Rotate Anticlockwise
• L = Rotate Clockwise
• U = Detonate Torpedoes

And ENTER starts a new round.

About the Score

Hit another ship and you get 1 point. Be hit and you lose 1 point. Hit yourself or fall into the dark star and you lose 2 points.

About Torpedoes

You can only have 3 torpedoes alive at any given time. That's why you have a Detonate Torpedoes command so you can "have them back" whenever you want. (Sometimes an wandering torpedoe is perfect to surprise your enemies... Or yourself! Watch out!)

Where do We Go from Here?

This beta can probably get a lot better with a lot of tweaks, some sounds, gamepad support, more animations etc.

I will try to make it happen if there any players out there asking for it. =P

Making the Game

This is my first game. (Actually, second...) It is beta (alpha perhaps) and I decided to publish it to find out if it is fun. Fun to someone else I mean. =P

I played a similar game for years with friends on Windows. It was called Duel! v2.0, and it was awesome!

Eventually I found out the creator, Guy Gervais, was inspired by a great book called The Tinkertoy computer and other machinations, by Alexander Dewdney.

On chapter 8 of his book, named Star Tek Dynamics, Dewdney writes about a game called Star Trek or Space War that students used to play close to his office in the early seventies and goes on about how to implement a similar game.

I eventually concluded that Star Trek is probably a later version of Spacewar! from 1962. (With a different Sci-Fi universe inspiration.)

The gist being, that straightforward Windows game I used to play for hours with friends had a cool backstory going all the way back to the beginning of Video Games History!

I had to do something about it. So I did this. =)

And I hope other people will have the opportunity to find it and have fun. I don't know any friends that still gather in front of a computer to play something but I hope they still exist somewhere.

It is also great to have what was previously a executable program and turn it into a web application that you can play immediately on most machines.

There some fancy (and awesome) projects recreating the original Spacewar! and although they are impressive, I did not find them very fun. They lack the fast pace of Duel! v2.0 and that's what I went for with NWA. Each round can take from a few seconds to one or two minutes.

If read all this, thank you very much for your time. Hope you have fun!

Contact

Ask me anything or say anything writing to slacktracer@gmail.com.