Tron: MCP Cone is a mobile iOS rendition of the classic minigame from the from the Tron arcade game, MCP Cone. This was made over the course of a week as an assingment for the Mobile Games seminar offered by the School of Interactive Games and Media at R.I.T. in which students had to recreate a classic “Breakout”-like game to demonstrate a rudimentary understanding of Objective-C structure and iOS architecture.

Tron Title Screen

Tron Gameplay

If the MCP Cone collides with Tron he is “derezzed”. The player only has five lives during a session.

Gameplay

The objective of the game is quite simple. The player starts on one side of a multi-colored cone/wall and must shoot projectiles at the blocks that form the wall to get to the objective on the other side; in the original game this was the cone itself. The wall is usually six blocks across the screen (with more located off) and rotates either clockwise or counterclockwise. The wall can have a depth of anywhere from four to six layers, but the real kicker is that this wall is slowly approaching the player as the game is going on. Oh, did I forget to mention that if the player touches any part of the wall that they die?

The scoring is based purely on the number of blocks removed from the screen with an additional bonus rewarded if the player can manage to clear the screen before proceeding to the next level. The game progresses until the player runs out of lives with each new level consisting of walls that rotate and drop faster.

User Controls

Most of the game elements are created dynamically, but the only real concerns that the player has worry about is movement and shooting.

• Movement : The player will be able to move their character about the screen using the accelerometer. Tilting the device right to left moves the character horizontally and up/down moves the character vertically.

• Shooting : The player will only be able to have a finite number of bullets/balls on the screen at any given point (5), but shooting will be done by tapping the screen on the device. The ball’s velocity in the x and y direction will be determined by calculating the angle between the tap point and the player’s current location in relation to the maximum velocity that the ball is allowed to move. Once enough balls are no longer on screen, the player will be able to continue shooting, otherwise tapping the screen will not produce a response.