Lander Game

Overview

This was a game I knocked up for the October 2007 ‘Weekend of Code’. Basically it is a port of the traditional lander simulation where you have to land a craft on terrain with a limited amount of thrust.

This version gives you five attempts. With each attempt your thrust decreases and the gravity increases thus making it a bit more tricky.

The terrain is generated with a very basic cubic point interpolation algorithm. To make it look fancier I added a gradient effect, which I will admit is very poorly implemented as it’s very slow doing it the way I ended up doing it. This was due to the fact there is a lot of overhead accessing pixels on the display surface due to the program switching between C bindings and the Ruby VM.

Anyhow as hinted, the game was slapped together in just over a day, including graphics. While Ruby is rather slow and not suitable for commercial grade games scripting, it’s expressiveness makes it a pleasant language to do this sort of short term code.

The download below contains the source code and Ruby run time for Windows platforms. Windows users should just be able to double click on ‘run.bat’. The game should work on Linux platforms too if you are willing to faff with compiling SDL and RUDL manually.

Technology Used

• Language: Ruby 1.8.x
• Library: RUDL (Ruby SDL Bindings)

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File: Download