Pyrox

About

A 2D puzzle game, where the initial levels are easy and fun, but as you progress, it becomes fiendishly difficult. The goal is to collect all of the coins and stamps, without getting stuck, while avoiding being hit on the head by falling rocks.

Drop rocks on carefully placed grenades to blow away obsticles, but make sure you don't blow up any coins, or yourself!

Progress

All of the game characters are complete, and there are a couple of dozen levels. There currently is no sound.

History

Pyrox is largely based on my favourite childhood game : "Repton" on the BBC micro. The final sequel, "Repton Infinity", allowed me to write my own repton-like games, but it was limited in what was possible. Whilst at university I wrote my own puzzle game called ROX, which stood for "Rip Off of XOR" (XOR was a similar grid based puzzle game), with the added pun of sounding like "Rocks". The "menu" screen had the letters "ROX" swimming around the screen, following the mouse pointer. They would often reverse themselves, spelling "XOR" instead of "ROX".

Rox was written (badly) in machine code on the Acorn Archimedes. The frame rate was too low which caused it to be visually jarring. However, the game play was exactly what I wanted, but everybody else found it far too difficult, even after I made simpler levels.

The early version of Rox had bees flying around, but these never made it into the final game. They make a comeback here, turning flowers into pumpkins. The bees fulfil the same role as Repton's "spirits" which unlock caged diamonds.

Pyrox has taken all of the best elements from both Repton 3, XOR and Rox. As it's written using my game engine Itchy, it is vastly superior to Repton Infinity. I can add extra characters very easily, and unlike Repton Infinity, there really is no limit! In many ways Pyrox is the fulfilment of my childhood dreams.

The first version of Pyrox was written using Javascript as the scripting language, but this proved too slow, so I switched to Python. I later removed Javascript from Itchy completely, not because of its speed, but because it needed clunky shims to integrate it within Itchy, whereas jython and groovy needed no bodges.