Fluxor
by Karla Jacobsen for CSC-471

Overview

Screenshot of the Luxor game.

The goal behind my project was to create a simple game similiar 'Luxor' (a game found on www.msn.com under games). The concept behind the game is very simple. Users try to prevent a chain of objects (spheres in this case) from reaching their goal. To remove objects before they reach the goal, the user must create chains of 3 or more like-colored objects. Below is a brief outline of the general concepts:

Results

My game did not make it anywhere near my expectations. I started off by creating the hierarchical model of my cannon which can be translated horizontally. Then I added the ball which can be shot vertically across the screen. The next step was to model the track which probably caused me the most difficulty. I began with a series of control points to represent the path of the track, (shown in the screenshots below, represented as small, purplish dots). Then I had to figure out how to smoothly interpolate a curve between the points. In the end, I used a b/spline to interpolate between the points.

Once I had my track it was not too difficult to create a single sphere which moved along the track. The major problems that I then encountered concerned spacing between the points. As you can see, there is a large gap between each ball, but these balls should form a chain but I was not able to close the gap before the deadline.

The animation for the balls on the track and the shooting was handled by separate timer functions.

Instructions

Download the executable. Use the mouse to move the cannon laterally and left-click to fire a ball. You may also use the left/right arrow keys to move and the up arrow key to shoot.

Resources