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.