Zplax! version 1.0b - 29 March 2005

The Story

You are on an island with a big crater in the middle of it. It looks like a nice tranquil lake of watery stuff. Unfortunately where there are craters there is lava and it is about to overcome the island and take you with it. Sitting on top of the lava is a column of coloured ball looking things. In fact they are attracting the lava. The watery stuff is keeping the lava in check. You are in a rather precarious situation however you can do something about it - you have a big gun!

Your gun shoots these ball looking things at the column. The idea is to get rid of all of the balls. The balls are created from the watery stuff so loading one in the gun reduces the water level a bit. The balls are finely balanced and balls of the same colour have a strange relationship with each other. When you shoot a ball at the column one of four things can happen:

You hit the water. This does nothing to the column of balls but the water level reduces even more.
You hit a ball of a different colour. This is known as an 'argh'. The ball you hit is transformed to the colour of the ball you shot.
You hit a ball of the same colour. This is known as a 'squeek'. The ball you shot evaporates.
You hit a blank spot on the column. This is known as a 'plonk'. The ball you shot sticks to the column.

If one of the last three things happen the you have disturbed the column. If there are more than three balls of the same colour adjacent to the spot you hit, that are of the same colour as the one you shot with, they will all be ejected from the column. The more balls you can dislodge with a single hit the better. Balls clink down to fill the spots from the ones you eject.

The aim of the game is to get rid of all the balls without running out of water from the crater.

Playing the game

To start click on the icon in the top left corner and click 'New Game'. As soon as the balls appear you can load you gun with a right click. Aim by left mouse button dragging and fire with a right click. Firing will also reload the gun. The colour of ball you get is random, however is proportional to the number of balls of that colour left on the column.

Key controls

t,s,w - Hides or shows the time, score and water level windows.
i,o - Flys in or out the information banner.
b - Hides or shows the information banner.
c - Brings up a window that shows the fps and the proportion of time spent rendering in a game cycle
esc - Exits the game

Levels

You can select one of five preset levels or create your own custom level of difficulty.

Settings

In the settings window you can alter the fidelity of the water and ball rendering (for new balls only).

You can also change skins (registered users only).

Scores

View high scores in the scores window. Only the ten best scores for each level are stored. You can submit your scores to the website (registered users only) NOTE: In the beta version this creates a file scores.xml in your program directory.

Help

In the help window you can re-enable the tutorial if you want to see those banners again. You can also link to the website and enter your registration code

More

Link to the website for more information, skins, etc http://zplax.alistairdickie.com