Fractal's Recent Projects

RocketLander

Rocket Lander A game by Fractal Up-Arrow : fire main thrusters. Left-Arrow and Right-Arrow : rotate the rocketship. r : Turn Radio on/off. The radio can be a distraction. Try to land the rocketship on the landing-pad. Fuel is limited - you wouldn't want to run out! Go Slowly - the spaceship is very fragile - too fast or if you don't land nearly level, the landing gear will buckle and the fuel-tanks will explode! In the top-left you have a fuel guage with a speed warning indicator for both vertical and horizontal movement. When these show bright-red, you are moving too fast to attempt a safe landing. If a yellow warning-triangle appears, your craft is at too sharp an angle to land - rotate to the upright position. In the top-right you have a lives-indicator and a blue outline of the rocketship which is a measure of your hull-integrity. The fainter this graphic is, the closer you are to losing hull-integrity and a life. If you touch the landscape or land on the pad too fast or crooked, your hull will take damage. The amount of damage sustained will depend on your speed. The first few levels are simple training levels. Things start to get a bit interesting after that... Please leave me a comment or a "loveit".

MoonMoth

The Magical Journey of the MoonMoth A game by Fractal Ahh the life of a moth. These little creatures spend their evenings flitting about searching for the light of the Moon. Some moths are special. They have a mission in life - to fly high and reach for the moon! How they get the energy to fly so high was a mystery, but you can see for yourself how these pretty little insects capture magical moondust contained in small moonstones which can be found in rays of moonlight on clear nights! Honest! Use the mouse to steer your flitting magic moth. Your journey can only continue as long as you keep searching for the moonstones, so fly high little MoonMoth, reach for the Moon! Press the q-key for about one second to quit the game early. TODO: Sound (as ever). Score. "Enemies". More Powerups. Better backgrounds. Moonbeams. Better (q)uit feature. The Moon(!). If you enjoy this game, please take the time to post me a message. You might think about giving me a "loveit" too! Credits: Some graphics adapted and heavily modified from sources on the Internet: home.att.net/~scorh/ (Moth) reinerstileset.4players.de/englisch.html (Jewels) scri8e.com/stars/index.html (MothTrail)

Motorway Racer

Race around a short racetrack set in London. The scene is the beginning of the famous M1 motorway at Brent Cross in North London. Race your car around the track which has been made by knocking a hole in the central barrier. Up Arrow : Accelerate Down Arrow : Brake Left Arrow : Steer Left Right Arrow : Steer Right This is game is still under development, though is substatially finished. New version with no yellow track-lines. This version looks so much better now that the overlay for the yellow side-lines has been removed, but it does run a little slower. Now with a realtime stopwatch indicating the current elapsed time, lap-time and best-lap timings. To Do: Better car physics. A.I. Cars. Sound. Reverse Gear. Some track modifications such as some missing tyre barriers. Other tracks based on satellite images. Fix Flyover. Tidy Start-Line. Many other fixes. Images gathered from Google Maps. The car is taken from a photo of a toy. Please leave a comment if you have any suggestions for improvements. If you have played it for a while, learned the track and have improved your laptime, please take the time to go back to scratch.mit.edu and give me a "loveIt" - you now you should ;-)

Entities

ENTITIES - a game by Fractal A simple shoot-em-up. Up-Arrow = Forwards Left-Arrow = Spin left Right-Arrow = Spin Right Spacebar = Fire N = Next Weapon Shoot the hostile entities discovered in this remote area of space. Little is known about them but try to keep away from them because they cause damage to your hull. The state of your hull is indicated by an icon in the top-righthand corner of the screen. Red=bad, Blue=Risky, Green=healthy. Pick up the shield-cells to improve your hull. Unfortunately the entities have been known to capture these cells in the same way. The basic weapon is slow but dependable. The second weapon, the Rainbow-Cannon, is very powerfull, though short-range. Use of this weapon is dangerous because shield energy is used to power it. Overuse can cause the hull to fail - beware! The entities can get very annoyed by your presence in this area of space. Try to eradicate them before they get really angry... This game is unfinished, though you can play it for a long time facing increasing difficulties until the inevitable... TODO: Sound. Other entities (there are only three creatures in this game). Other powerups - especially weapons. Gameplay tweaks. Credits The artwork in this game is mostly mine. The spaceship and entity parts were crafted from various bits of graphic from the internet. The shield powerup is from "Doom". The background is from somewhere on the web, but I can't remember where.

Mandelbrot-Zoom v2.0

*** Now with faster Zoom feature *** This is a Mandelbrot fractal generator program with a zoom feature. Instructions are presented to you as you use the program - just wait a while and a reminder will pop up. When this program is started you are presented with a view of nearly the entire fractal. A "zoom-box" cursor follows your mouse. Using the mouse, select an area you would like to zoom into and click to begin the render process. The new fractal is generated in low-resolution at first, then in increasing resolutions and detail. This is a "preview" version of the fractal and is generated quite quickly, allowing you to choose which areas to zoom into further. You can continue to select new zoom areas even before the preview has completed. Problem: Scratch uses a round-ended style when drawing using the "pen", a fact I only discovered late during development. To begin a full-resolution render of the current preview, press the "R" key (which takes some time). The current colour-depth (loop iterations) is fixed at 40. The high-resolution images do not suffer from the round-ended pen-style. At any time during the preview process, you can press the "S" key to enter slideshow-mode in which several zoomed images of the Mandelbrot set created with this program are presented in sequence. Press "S" again when in slideshow-mode to return to preview-mode. I have a habit of writing a fractal generator whenever I discover a new programming language and I thought I'd try it in Scratch. I have tried to optimise the program as much as possible for speed, but Scratch still takes a long time to render a complete full-resolution zoom screen. I have tried it on different computers and it does speed up a little on a fast machine (though not as much as I expected). If you are interested in discovering more about fractals, there are many other free fractal-generators available. If you are wondering what a fractal is and how these beautiful images are created, a good source of information is the Internet.