Viper

The helicopter circles the home base

This game was inspired by two of my favorite games ever: SkyStrike (another STOS game) and Harrier Attack. I had planned the gameplay to be very similar to skystrike, with various missions played out in a large playing area.

[SkyStrike by the way, is worth of a special mention here - it (for me anyway) really stands out as a game. Its great fun to play, controlling a spitfire as you swoop around the french landscape, shooting up various enemies (were they Nazis?). The missions were varied, missions each one would have you doing something different to the last. The best thing about it IMO, and this I think is fairly important in any game: you dont have to stick to the story line - you can in fact fly around and do whatever you want! All this, and it was programmed in STOS - what an awesome advert!]

The player starts on this Navy ship.

To be fair Viper was going to be based very much on SkyStrike - the main idea is you only really have one life, and a limited supply of helicopters. If you die, thats it, but if you manage to crash land and live, you would just use your next helicopter. Missions would have been similar to 'Capture an enemy base', or 'Rescue captured commander', etc.

I didnt get as far as designing missions, but I did design the landscape. The player starts of perched on the end of a navy ship, just off the coast of some Asian islands. The initial aim would have been to disable a airfield on the first island, enabling the invasion force to establish a beach head. Subsequent levels would have seen you flying further into the jungle, and beyond to other islands, back and forth, shooting various things no doubt, until the enemy had been eradicated.

The player shoots up an enemy airfield.

I'm quite proud of the graphics in this game - the helicopter animates smoothly, and in fact flies quite realisticly. If you just hover the helicopter, you can see it being blown around by the breeze. The controls I think were quite simple - all using the joystick - it remains to be seen wether anyone else though so! I did implement a random input effect - which would have been triggered if the helicopters controls had been shot. The thing careers around with the player only slightly in control. This coupled with the engines failing - you'd have had to try hard to put it down in a clear spot without killing yourself!

In the demo below, I implemented a feature that was supposed to stop the helicopter flying too hight - i.e. thin air. I got the calculations the wrong way round, and if you fly too high, it becomes easier and quicker to gain height (the opposite of what I wanted!) and you can end up falling up, forever - oops.

The player flys over a beach, and heads into another island

Although there is no sound in this game, I had ideas for this. When the helicopter's engine was turned off, I was going to randomly play jungle sounds (i.e. bird noises, crickets etc). I was also going to make birds fly across the screen - ala Cannonfodder.

A feature I nearly did comlpete was the intro animation. This was done in PAM and is included in PAMs download area.

More Screenshots

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  High in the sky

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  Flying backwards

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  The start of an airfield

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  A waterfall in the jungle

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  Some buildings to blow up

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  Game sprites

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  More sprites

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  Some title screen - I think this was going to be part of an animation?

Download

Instructions

Once the game loads, hold down fire and up / down to control the throttle. Throttle all the way up to go up, down to go down, and somewhere in the middle to hover.

Press up to tip forward, and travel forward. Down tips back, and you travel backwards.

Left and right turns the helicopter. Fire fires the current weapon, 'w' selects another weapon. (There is a bug when a bomb or missile fires, causing the game to slow down).