An open-source Java game by Lucas Catabriga Rocha, available here
. It contains many of the staple features of artillery games. Two teams of soldiers are placed on a randomised battlefield and take turns to shoot at each other until the other team is eliminated. However, instead of shooting bullets which always move in straight lines or follow parabolic trajectories, the player in Graphwar types in a mathematical function and that is used to produce the bullet's path.
Graphwar provides examples of:
- Comeback Mechanic: A subtle one. Your function could well fail or miss the first time you try it, but may only need slight modifications to succeed, and the function that a soldier shoots is saved so that when you next control him you can easily change it and try again. However, if you have four soldiers alive you'll have to wait three more turns before you get back to the original soldier, while an opponent down to his last soldier can work on the same function during every one of his turns. This, combined with the fact that a single well-executed shot can wipe out an entire enemy team, means comebacks are much more common than in other artillery-type games.
- Friendly Fireproof: Averted almost entirely - you can't shoot backwards, but your shots may hit and kill your own soldiers if they're in front of you.
- Logic Bomb: Functions may stop and explode as soon as they're fired if you do something mathematically impossible (such as dividing by zero or trying to find the square root of a negative number).
- No Plot? No Problem!
- One-Hit-Point Wonder: Mixed with One-Hit Polykill: Shots kill soldiers instantly and only stop when they travel too far, become mathematically impossible or hit an obstacle or the edge of the screen.
- One-Word Title: Due to a Portmantitle compound of Graph and War, since this is about graphing and battles between shooters.
- Painfully Slow Projectile: Primarily because of Rule of Cool, since soldiers have no way of dodging enemy shots.
- Randomly Generated Levels: Levels consist of a random number of solid circular obstacles of random sizes placed in random positions on a Cartesian plane. Soldiers of each team are then put in random positions on either half of the plane.
- Robo Teching: Many shots end up looking like this, especially when the absolute value function is incorporated.
- Your Head A-Splode: Since soldiers visually consist of nothing but disembodied heads, this is to be expected.
