Project Stallion / Zherebets Proyekta

In 1983, the Cold War detente became destabilized by a new weapons program: the Strategic Defense Initiative, or as it became known, Star Wars. The Soviets hatched a secret plan to strike back against Reagan's new program. They had discovered a new radioactive isotope, Tolstoium-317, that could turn gentle creatures into ravenous killing machines. They infiltrated the U.S., building underground bunkers stocked with Ty-317, ready to turn our animal friends against us. Their goal: overthrow democracy by mutating our horses.

Today, the Soviets are long gone, but their secret bunkers remain, leaking Ty-317 into our barns and stables. You need to vanquish this relic Cold War threat and save the U.S.A.

Your Goal: Free the horses from the threat of mutation, i.e _unstable_ them.

This is a very silly game. The controls are simple. You can only do two things:

* _Click_ on Ty-317 canisters to detonate them
* Use the _space bar_ to extend control rods

The rest of the game mechanics happen as a result of these actions. Each level, you're trying to get enough energy to your drone (the little patriotic rocket thing) to move it along its preprogrammed course and up through the culvert to the horse stable. The drone gains energy from the explosion of the Ty-317 canisters. The closer the drone is to an exploding canister, the more energy it will receive, and the farther it can go. The energy is related to the square of the distance to the canister, so a canister right under the drone will charge it a lot, while one farther away will charge it hardly at all.

Challenges:

* The exploding canisters are unstable. When they blow up, they emit particles that can trigger other canisters to detonate.
* If you overcharge your drone, it will explode, and your horses will fall victim to the commies. It is very easy to overcharge the drone if it is near a bunch of exploding canisters that go off all at once.
* If use up all your canisters and still don't charge your drone enough, it will be unable to complete its path, and you will end up with mutant horses and lose the level.

Hints:

* Canisters give way more power to your drone when it is close by, so it can be good to click a canister as the drone passes. Good timing can help a lot.
* Because the canisters explode unpredictably, sometimes you'll get lucky or unlucky
* Some levels have random arrangements of canisters, and a particular arrangement might be very difficult to beat. In that case, just restart the level for a new setup.

* Control rods do three things:
1. they stop your drone from charging, even if canisters are going off nearby, so you can save your drone from overcharging.
2. they stop the drone from moving, even if it has energy to use
3. they provide a barrier to particles from explosions, so they can keep chain-reaction explosions from happening

All levels are winnable. Levels #6 and #7 can be pretty challenging, and they can have a lot of luck involved, but careful use of your control rods can help you control the situation better.

Theme:

I tried to use the theme in a bunch of different ways:
- The Cold War was an unstable geopolitical situation
- The conceit of the game is that SDI made it more unstable
- The radioactive canisters are unstable and can go off at any time, creating cascading chains of explosions
- Your goal is to free horses from their barns (i.e. unstabling them). Get it? Get it? It's the whole joke. Really.

Tools:

This is an HTML5 game that uses the CraftyJS JavaScript library for games. For sound, I relied entirely on my mouth as modified through GoldWave audio. For graphics, I relied on PowerPoint and GIMP. For three 3D models, the pipe, the drone, and the isotope canisters, I used Wings 3D. I wrote the one little piece of music in NoteFlight. I make use of two main fonts: Kremlin by Vic Feiger and AudioWide by Brian Bonislawski, plus a little bit of Ink Free by Steve Matteson for some of the graffiti in the bunkers. I modified a couple of bits of old Soviet imagery to create some of the bunker decoration visual elements, but they were heavily reworked and modded by me, and I think any of those should be fine under the derivative work rules for the Compo.