River Raid

For the third round of "The 20 Games Challenge," I had to pick between 'Space Invaders,' 'Frogger,' and 'River Raid.' Went with River Raid because it's got some cool history: developed by Carol Shaw, the first female game designer at Atari and one of the earliest worldwide.

All three games seemed tempting, but I couldn't resist the urge to spice things up and tackle "River Raid," noted as the most challenging. Moreover, it was the only one of the three without representation in the showcase that the challenge features for each game.

Try The 20 Games Challenge!

Controls:

  Movement: "A", "S", "D", "W"  or  "Left", "Down", "Right" , "Up" Arrows

  Fire: "Left Control" or "Space bar"

  "Escape" for in game pause menu

 * the "main", "game over" and "pause" menus are mouse only

Goal:

• Create and animate a jet fighter. The screen will scroll vertically, and the jet can move side to side. The player can accelerate or brake, which will change the vertical scrolling speed.
• Add a river bank on both sides of the level. The river can vary in size, or even split into two streams. Hitting the river bank will kill the player.
• Divide the game into levels. Between levels, the river will narrow, and there will be a bridge crossing it. Bridges act as checkpoints. The player must shoot the bridge, colliding with it will kill the player.
• Add some enemies! Boats and helicopters will move back and forth across the river. Jets will cross the entire screen. Colliding with an enemy will kill the player.
• Add fuel depots. Flying over these will replenish the player’s fuel reserves. The player can shoot and destroy fuel depots, but colliding with them doesn’t kill the player.
• Add a UI with a life counter, score, and fuel gauge. The fuel gauge will drain slowly, and the player will die if it reaches “empty”
• Give the player the ability to shoot things! Shooting things increases the player score.

Stretch goals:

• Not sure how to make the game infinitely long? The easy way would be to create multiple hand-crafted levels that start and end with a bridge. The fun way would be to generate the levels dynamically on the fly.
• The Atari 2600 could only display limited sprites. Modern computers are capable of creating massive particle effect explosions

Carol Shaw: The Game Awards Industry Icon (Link to YouTube. I can't embed it because, for the video to work, I have to disable the "SharedArrayBuffer" option on itch.io, and then the embedded game stops working. Drop a comment if you've got a workaround!)

I used this image as a reference:

fonts by Nimble Beasts Collective