If you have not already done so, check out the new Launch Brigade inspired video game Destroy ‘em. Use the space bar to shoot;  left and right arrows to move;  up arrow to accelerate;  and hit ‘p’ to pause.  Hit F5 to start a new game.  There are currently four levels in Destroy ‘em.  If you reach level 3, you are really good at the game!

Background

Back in December 2012, while we were designing the Launch Brigade logo, we thought it would be clever if we could animate the rocket so it could fly out of the logo.  That was easy to accomplish using CSS3 animation. We next thought it would be a cool idea to create a video game that could be started from the Launch Brigade logo in an email.  The only drawback is your typical email program limits the use of embedded JavaScript, so we would need to insert a link in the email, that when clicked, will redirect to a landing page with the game. Then, Chris Miller found the Kick Ass Application.  This is an Asteroids inspired shoot ‘em up game with the goal of hitting the HTML elements on a page. We figured that we could create a retro game similar to Asteroids, but that we had to make the game our own. Launch Brigade delivers WordPress solutions; so when the rocket ship begins a new life, a WordPress logo serves as the shield that provides invulnerability for a couple seconds. We used the Drupal and Joomla (Level 2) logos as the asteroids. Instead of having enemy ships firing at you in the game of Asteroids, we let loose a Trojan Horse, that when hit, releases Internet Explorer asteroids (Level 3).

Credits

Greg Bettinger had fun coding “Destroy ‘em” in his spare time, gradually adding functionality as the design evolved.  Greg relied on feedback from the Launch Brigade team members involved in the design and beta testing.