Just a little fund side-project, trying to create an ‘endless runner’-type game in Power Apps.
The game relies on several background layers attached to a timer to create a parallax effect to add depth and motion:
The timer can be ‘sped up’ to increase the speed of the game, and by extension the difficulty. This is quite tricky to achieve, and you can see some visual jerks in the video as this happens. This isn’t actually a modification to the timer, which just has a really long duration, but to a modifier number held in a variable. When this is increased, it affects the motion tweening of the parallax layers, causing acceleration.
The layers themselves are on differing paces, with the foreground being the fastest. The obstacles are simply recurring image controls with a rock graphic applied. These animated in exactly the same way as the background. There is a timer with an extremely short duration which checks for ‘collisions’ between the player avatar and the rocks. This is done by making a check on the X, Y, Height and Width properties of both every time the timer ends.
I plan on expanding this concept when I have time. My main ambition is to vary the pattern of rocks as they come at the player, introducing some randomness. I plan to achieve this by using a gallery with each cell representing a potential placement of a rock. This can be randomised using another timer, which updates a collection that holds the position of rocks. The gallery can then be animated, with the position of the gallery itself, plus the relative position of a rock within it, being deduced to calculate collisions.
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