(AO)rbiter

Created by Olin Gallet | @olingallet

What is (AO)rbiter?

(AO)rbiter is an arcade rail shooter designed for #LoadingJam. The intent was to create a minimalistic game that was fun enough to keep a player occupied while content would be loading yet not invest a player to keep playing.

Although loading screens are less common nowadays, I watched what people did during queuing screens for League of Legends. I noticed people played quick, reflex-intensive games like Super Hexagon and Tetris and used that as inspiration.

The name is supposed to have a combined letter like the 'A' and 'E' in words like aether. That way, it'd be a combination of the words 'arbiter' and 'orbiter'.

How do you play?

You are the pink ball. Use the up and down keys to move along the rail while dodging green balls. You can shoot them by pressing left arrow to shoot left and right arrow to shoot right. Shooting a green ball scores one point. If a green ball touches you, the enemy gets one point. Once the white circle is complete, the final score is recorded (but you can still play if you want).

You can also try using a gamepad. My testing ability is limited but I was able to use an XBox 360 controller in the Firefox browser. Try it out, but I can't make any promises.

Afterthoughts on the Project

The original idea was to use the growing white circle as a shield to reflect back the green balls. After looking at the math involved I decided against it. As far as my performance goes, I'm happy with how I did. I was able to use some library code from other games to make some steps much easier. The code is also documented and organized so it would be easy to make changes if I want to revisit this project.

And here is the source code:

gitHub