Morse Race

SUMMER 2012

I participated in the Exile Game Jam, where I worked with two old friends and a new one to make a racing game where players advance by entering Morse code. I programmed the game entirely on my own, which was a challenge because I hadn't worked in ActionScript in a while (2 years!), and I hadn't programmed a game for a game jam before.

It turned out all right – the game is playable and conveys the Morse mechanic. Players might not notice that they're Morsing out old-fashioned swears at the other player, as we didn't have time to implement anything to indicate that. The game is quite strong aesthetically, with the black and white grainy look, and the old orchestrated music.

The biggest challenge was in getting the game to recognize an input pattern of dots and dashes, no matter what speed the player entered them in. Instead of setting an absolute value for the threshold between dots and dashes, I coded the game so that it would compare the lengths of the input and figure out the pattern of dots (1 beat) and dashes (3 beats). It was fun!

TEAM

Agnieszka Loza (art)
Thomas Ryder (text)
Søren Andersen (sound)
Xavier Stamps-Lafont (code)