Air Rider by Hawkie
Welcome to the era of balloon flight, where travel was adventurous and risky. A world where balloon pilots gained notoriety from their glorious achievements.
You are a pilot in an attempt to break the distance record of a passenger flight. Gain prestige by flying a hot air balloon as far as you can and landing alive.
Passengers beware, the pilot is risking everything on this venture and may sacrifice you overboard to survive. That is the risk each passenger must accept to be part of this momentous flight.
| HTML5 (web) | https://hawkie123.itch.io/air-rider |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/air-rider |
Ratings
| Overall | 761th | 3.117⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 801th | 2.867⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 540th | 3.121⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 836th | 2.95⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 531th | 2.8⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 686th | 3.111⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 26🗳️ | 28🗨️ |
Good luck to all for Ludum Dare 43. This is my first ever experience of this. But I've spent a while getting my own typescript game engine ready.
I woke up this morning at 2am to look at the LD theme to find it was one I hadn't really thought about. Went back to bed for four hours and re awoke with an idea about sacrificing passengers on a competitive balloon ride - where the aim is to travel as far as possible for prestige. I got to work on the balloon mechanics using my own typescript framework and after a 16 hours managed to create something like a balloon flight simulator. Its damn tricky to land. You have to have less than 10 descent speed and land on a flat bit of ground. Score is based on flying as far as you can. You can ditch passengers using space key to go further. :)

Git Hub User: Hawkie.

https://github.com/Hawkie/LudumDare43
If you have mastered it, for an extra challenge try landing without using the burner - ejecting passengers only.
You can play repeatedly (N) and build score from previous successes.
Keys:
Q = Burner (increase temp)
A = Dump Air (decrease temp!)
Left = Jet air to go left (loses some temp)
Right = Jet air to go right (loses some temp)
Space = Eject passenger to lighten the load.
Esc = return to main menu
With you can, Play my game !
I didn't feel the urge to sacrifice the passengers though. Like if the point of the flight was to go as war as I can - why take passengers in the first place? And if there are passengers on board then their safety is more important than going far without any specified goal...
Music is Awesome though.
So, great game, nice mechanics and awesome music! And separately, nice job on making it with typescript. (I hope, it didn't slow you down much.)
The theme was used in an interesting way here since there was seemingly no bad effects of sacrificing your passengers, it was only helpful because you would get further. Perhaps some penalty for sacrificing the passengers could be introduced but I guess gameplay wise there could have been a bit more depth to compensate for this as well.
Great job overall! :smile: