February 23rd, 2021 10:43 PM — You are an X that goes on a quest.
Hey TPK,

Today we launched X-Quest, a skill based cyberspace minigame.

Here's how to play:


Quote:
Use WASD/IJKL/Arrow keys to move X around. Collect 5 different powerups, and then use the E key to activate them when it suits you. Shoot at enemy spaceships with the up arrow key. Make sure to stay on the road and watch out for enemy fire. Three lives and you're out. Good luck!

You earn minigame points based off of your score and your level. They are both important, so do the best you can. You can make the quest more difficult with modifiers in the options page. These will also give you a big minigame point boost if you can manage to survive long enough with them on to get a good score. Modifiers do not affect the score, only minigame points.



I don't have much to say other than I'm really happy to see so many people enjoying it so far on this first day. I'm probably gonna make a video about it, and showing how to pull off some of the finer mechanics. Keep an eye out for that. I'll be grinding for high scores on stream along with the rest of you.

Higher Or Lower

Everyone's favorite look-at-number-and-click minigame Higher or Lower has disbanded. The TPK Staff have made sure the resident Plusle and Minun have a great new home for their retirement. Believe it or not minigames used to come and go fairly frequently. HoL has been basically the same for 6 years. I promise X-Quest is a much better game overall though. We replaced the achievement with one for X-Quest, and will replace the achievement buff related to HoL soon.

Bonus: X-Quest Dev Log

X-Quest was originally created in 2014 as a side project from TPK. Because all I knew was websites, the engine was literally just updating text in the browser very quickly. From my realization that I could do that, I tried to create a game, and came up with X-Quest. It had basic functionality and was this awful white on black color scheme. Even then people were telling me it would be fun to throw it in TPK and have it reward minigame points. The combination of not knowing how to do it technically, and not being completely satisfied with how fun the game was led me to leave it alone. In 2016 with the launch of Walden's World several months earlier, I added high scores giving X-Quest a permanent home. In late 2017, I took another crack at the game with a few months of development into version 1.0. This finally reversed the colors, giving a black background, added new powerups, 8 bit sound effects, and the infamous nightmare mode.

Coming into 2021, after giving some thought as to what projects I wanted to do this year, X-Quest came up as a way to flex the developer muscles in a way I haven't for several years. A short enough project that could actually be completed. Most of it was livestreamed as well, so I had the motivation and input from the few of you who joined (thanks!). During the development, the game was recoded from scratch with canvas rendering instead of browser text rendering. This allowed for significantly faster and less laggy gameplay and allowed me to expand the game wider and taller. I designed a new game loop to allow for entities and collisions generally, that let me quickly add new behaviors like the road shot, the carrier ship, and score animations. Once these 2 things were done, development was a breeze and actually pretty fun. I also busted out my analog synthesizer and redid a lot of the sound effects in the game by hand. It's a better game with sound, I promise. When it came time to implement the game into TPK, I added a series of PHP scripts that update and keep track of your game to ensure fair gameplay and reward minigame points based on your skill in the game.

~B0sh