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Blastosaurus Rex
Saved games stay in this browser only.
About the game
Her Majesty Queen Victoria III has commanded that a colony of the British Empire be established on an island that nobody has returned from alive, and the reason is soon clear: it is full of dinosaurs, and they explode. Worse, they have developed an appetite for the coal in your ships. You have four vessels, you cannot build more, and without them you can never go home.
Each of the five chapters has two halves. First you prepare: right click on a plot of land to open the build menu and place cannons, cabbage fields and houses, or click on the edge of a plot to put up fences and walls. Spend your pounds, shillings and binary pence wisely, because the colony's money is counted in a currency of sixteens. Then the onslaught starts and you can only give orders to your soldiers: click one to select it, click on the field to send it there. Cannons only fire when a soldier is standing near them, and the dinosaurs, from nimble raptors to tanks wearing armour and giants that blow up, go for the ships, for the fences and for your men.
What survives counts. Unharmed crops feed new soldiers, houses give them room to live, and anything damaged but not destroyed can be repaired for a fraction of the price before the next chapter. Lose all four ships and you start the chapter again.
It was written in a week for the fifteenth PyWeek competition, in 2012, by two people, with a bookish Victorian look, and an encyclopaedia of the beasts and the machines inside.
Playing it here
The first time you click Play the page downloads the Python runtime and the pygame library (about 23 MB), which takes a few seconds; after that a "click to start" message appears, and one more click opens the menu. The download is kept by your browser, so the other pygame games on the site open faster. Nothing is loaded from other sites. Your saved situations stay in this browser only ("Continuation" in the menu). "Termination" simply restarts the menu.
This version is silent: the music and sound effects of the original were taken out, because the credits say they were taken from other sites and do not say which files, so their licences cannot be checked. The type is a replacement too (IM Fell English).
Controls
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| Right click on the field | open the build menu |
| Left click on a plot or edge | repeat the last build |
| Left click on a soldier, then on the field | select a soldier and send it there |
| Space or Enter | start the onslaught |
| Left / right arrows | turn the pages of the manual and the encyclopaedia |
| Return | confirm a menu item or your name |
A few things worth knowing
Soldiers come first. A cannon without a soldier next to it will not fire, so keep your men beside your guns and move them when a flank is in danger.
Protect the ships above all. Everything else can be rebuilt; your ships cannot, and each one also gives your troops two more places to live.
Plant and house. An untouched field of cabbages (12 food) gains you a soldier after the battle, as long as you have houses, which hold three each.
Read the encyclopaedia. "Education" in the main menu describes every dinosaur and every machine, including which ones explode.
Frequently asked questions
Does it save my game? Yes: the game is saved between chapters, in this browser.
Does it work on a phone? It is played with a mouse and a keyboard, so not really.
Why is there no sound? The recordings in the original are not covered by a licence we can check, so they were left out.
Is it free? Yes: the code is free software under the GPL and the pictures are under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0.
Credits and licence
Blastosaurus Rex was made by scav and Threads for the fifteenth PyWeek competition, in 2012. The code is released under the GPL and the artwork under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. This version is the PyWeek package ported to Python 3, with a few more changes to run in a browser, no sound, and the font IM Fell English by Igino Marini (SIL Open Font License 1.1) in place of the original one (the complete source, the changes and the licence texts are linked from the Licenses page). The game runs on pygame-ce (LGPL-2.1) and CPython, whose licences and source are linked there too.