Fight Fire with Friends

A bushfire is coming up the valley and there is one town between it and the dawn. You have a truck, up to three friends and a night's work. Put out what you can. Cut a break where you can't. Get everyone out.

What You Do

• Put out fires. Get paid in XP. Take a card.

• Drive the truck. Someone has to.

• Bang on doors and walk the residents to the muster point.

• Move the livestock there too. They will not help you.

• Light your own fires with the drip torch. A paddock that has already burned cannot burn again.

• Cut a break with the chainsaw and the rake-hoe before the front arrives.

• Call the waterbomber when it is already too late.

The Fire Is Not Scenery

It is a cellular automaton over ninety-six thousand cells, and it does what a real one does.

• It runs uphill. Rate of spread doubles for every ten degrees of slope, which is what makes a ridge defensible and a gully lethal.

• The wind shifts, and the whole front turns with it.

• Grass goes out in a second. A house holds fire and holds it hard.

• Gas cylinders hiss for three seconds before they go. You get one warning and it is the only one.

• Every fire is remembered - including the ones you lit yourself.

Four of You, One Truck

• 1-4 player online co-op.

• A hose and two tools, signed out before you roll. That is the shift.

• Cards are yours, and everyone can see what you built. Some are the TRUCK's - and they burn with it.

• Lose the truck and you have ninety seconds on foot before relief lands. It is a long ninety seconds.

• Panic beacon, downed mates, drag them clear. Whole crew down is a loss in every mode.

A Shift Runs Until Dawn

• Thirteen minutes of Timed Shift, or Endless until it beats you.

• Several maps, generated fresh. The Town, River flats, the Lookout, the long paddock.

1997

• 320x240, vertex snapping, affine texture warp, dithering.

• Every texture is drawn procedurally when the game boots.

• Every sound is synthesised when the game boots.