The Shaft

Ready, Steady..... DROP!

The Shaft is a fast paced and challenging obstacle avoidance game in the style of old 80's PC games, but updated for the 21st century. Pilot your dropship down a never-ending shaft by using the intuitive motion controls. Touch the screen to fire retro thrusters to slow down. Try to go as fast as you can, as far as you can and compete with your friends for top-spot on our leaderboards. How deep can you go?

Great for long commutes, boring lectures, mind-numbing business meetings, or even bad dates - why not nip to the bathroom for some quick satisfaction with The Shaft.
Whether you have just a minute or hours to kill The Shaft is the game you need on your phone.

**We know The Shaft can be highly addictive, but please do not play while driving or operating heavy machinery**

Go Fast, Go Deep, Go Hard... or Go Home... Get THE SHAFT.

Instructions

The objective of The Shaft is simply to drop as far as you can without hitting the sides of the shaft. You pilot a small ship (the 'Drop Ship') which is equipped with retrothrusters to slow down. Piloting left and right is accomplished by tilting the phone and the retro thruster can be fired by touching anywhere on the screen. However, the faster you go, the more points you accumulate. Also, using the retro-thruster consumes fuel, which you have a limited amount of. As you fall you can pick up fuel canisters to replenish your retro fuel, coins to increase your score, and shields which allow you to hit the wall one time without crashing.

To get the most out of The Shaft be sure to invite your friends to play it and log into Google Play services so you can compare scores! It is the most fun when you are competing against your friends for best depth and highest score!

Technology

The Shaft is the first game by MapleScot development, it is available exclusively on Android. We decided to do a simple concept for our first game that would explore all of the different aspects of building a game, but would let us finish and publish in a reasonable timeframe. Before writing The Shaft we considered different frameworks and engines such as LibGDX, Cocos2d, Unity2d, etc. But, since we are both Java developers and are new to Android development we decided that we wanted to focus on understanding the platform itself so we decided to do the game entirely in core Android Java using straight OpenGL for the graphics. This allowed us to understand mobile development on Android and get a feel for some best practices for the platform.