Multiplayer game

Kurve

There are many brilliantly designed games that are very simple yet have great playability, and Kurve is one of the best examples. It's a modern remake of an old freeware DOS game from the mid-90s called "Achtung, die Kurve!," although many older players will recognize the gameplay as being similar to the light cycle level in the arcade game Tron, or perhaps even Snake on the Nokia 6110. In Kurve, you control the direction of a pixel that's drawing a continuous line by using only two keys, one for left and one for right. If at any point you cross a line or hit the edge of the gameplay area, you lose. But the brilliant element that makes it all so much fun is that six people can play at the same time – not online, or with different controllers, but all via one keyboard in front of your computer. It means you can get up to six of your friends together in close proximity, each with fingers delicately poised on specific pairs of keys on your keyboard, and each with the ability to zoom about across the screen creating a line in whatever color that person's pixel avatar has been granted.

The ensuing game is predictably chaotic but a lot of fun. Every player starts in a random location and needs to wait for the other players to press their keys to signal their ready state. Their dots are then launched across the screen, which quickly turns into cartoon-style spaghetti. Each player's drawing will stop at random points to create gaps that give skilled players a way through, and that means games last longer than in Tron, especially with fewer players. But it always ends the same way, as each player eventually succumbs to the mess of lines on the screen. All that's then left to do is enjoy your ranked moment on the leaderboard before pressing space to play again.

Project Website

https://github.com/h-valdes/kurve

Kurve is one of the best things to play on your computer when you can finally get a few friends around it in person.