Railstar Commander

Type your way to Victory!

In Railstar Commander you play as a starship captain, giving orders to your crew. Unfortunately, starship combat is a loud, chaotic business, so you must type your commands. Hopefully they had a good typing program at the academy!

Orders you can type are helpfully written beneath your targets. Lock torpedoes, fire weapons and... well that's actually it so far. Letters you've typed will light up under your targets showing if you've got a valid command or not. Type fast, because your ship's speed is slowly increasing. How far can you make it before an enemy collides with you or slips by?

Controls

• Type commands on the keyboard.
• If the typing isn't working, try reloading the browser.
• To play again, reload the browser (ouch, bad Mike! Bad!)

Hints

1. Play in full screen to better read the commands.
2. Blasters do much more damage at close range.
3. It's fine to lock a thing and leave it for later while you deal with other threats with a different weapon system.
4. You'll know you're super good at the game if you get to a point where your torpedoes can't accelerate from your ship.

Railstar Commander Was Made By

• Mike LeSauvage - design and code
• Anthony Free - the absolutely killer audio score.

Why This Game?

I've been dreaming of making a starship-order giving typing game since playing such a game in MS-DOS way back in the early 90s called Begin 2! I couldn't decide how fast it should play though, or what it should look like, and jumping in always felt a bit too much to get started. Global Game Jam was a great place to try one take on the game and see how it felt.

Future

I'd like to finish this up - I had many more ideas that had no way to make it into the jam. At a minimum I'd like to add:

1. Enemies fire torpedoes
2. Enemies can drop upgrades
3. Player ship can take damage
4. Player torpedoes reload
5. Player can repair damage
6. Player can order tractor beams on torpedoes
7. Player can shoot torpedoes
8. Player can tractor upgrades
9. Player can evade port/starboard to dodge enemy ships and torpedoes.