What is Impulse?

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Picture a mash-up of Super Meat Boy and Lunar Lander. Or N+ meets Asteroids. That’s Impulse.

The premise is simple. You need to guide your craft to the exit point of each level, avoiding the various obstacles and bad guys.

Levels are short, sometimes brutal affairs. There are no life limits, retry as many times as you need. Restarting a level is instant. There’s no waiting or loading — one moment you’re dead, a click of the mouse later and you’re ready to try again. You can even suicide so you don’t have to wait for death when you know you’ve fouled up.

Your craft is at the whim of Newtonian physics. With only a simple thruster you need to battle the forces of gravity and atmospheric drag all while avoiding high-speed impact. The trouble is that all these variables are liable to change with each level. Gravity could be strong, or weak, or zero; it may pull in any direction. Drag might mirror the vacuum of space or the ocean depths. Your craft’s thrusters might be strong or weak. You might have limited or limitless fuel. Your hull might laugh off high-speed impacts or it might shatter from the slightest bump.

With all these variables, levels take on very different feels. Some require careful thinking and gentle, deliberate action. Others are all about reflexes and reaction. Most are a mixture of both.

Development

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Impulse is currently in beta:

  • The game is feature-complete.
  • I’d be foolish to say there are no bugs. I can say no new bugs have been spotted for some time now.
  • The complete game will hopefully feature one hundred levels or more. The number of levels in increasing all the time.

Download

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Impulse is a free game.

Download the installer setup:

iinet mirror

Download the game files only in a zip (advanced users only):

iinet mirror

Impulse runs on Windows. It should work on XP (Home and Professional only), Vista, Windows 7, Server 2003 and Server 2008.

You must have the below components installed. (The installer will prompt you to get these components if you do not already have them.)

Music

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Several composers contributed to the music in Impulse.

Tracks by Michael Chadwick:

  • 12am
  • Apollo
  • Bihanga
  • Daedalus
  • Ethmos
  • Interstyssal
  • Mariana
  • Nega Zone
  • Quasar

Tracks by Hagen & Coldfingers:

Tracks by Daniel “Shrack” Swearengin:

  • Questions Without Answers

Tracks by Meteo Xavier:

  • Impulse One

Level Editor

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Impulse comes with a level editor. To learn more the level editor and level editing in general, click here.

Acknowledgements

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Sound effects by Daniel “Shrack” Swearengin.

Impulse uses the following fonts:

Impulse was built with the following technologies:

The Impulse level editor was built with the following technologies:

Some code inspired by Vector Rumble.

Thanks to Nelson Hurst for his XNA 3.1 to 4.0 Cheat Sheet.

The Impulse installer uses Inno Setup.

Icons were created with IcoFX.

FAQ and Troubleshooting

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Everything’s so small! How can I see what I’m doing?

Have you tried using the zoom controls? By default, it is bound to the mouse-wheel.

I got stuck in a level and there’s nothing I can do except quit out and come back to the level. What gives?

In situations like that, you’re supposed to suicide your craft. This allows you to instantly try again. (Indeed, it’s not just useful for when you get totally stuck, but when you know you’ve gotten off to a bad start and just want to try again.)

By default, suicide is bound to the middle mouse button and the space bar.

Why does the game crash?

Do you have the prerequisite components installed?

If you do I’ve no idea why the game would crash. I’d be thankful if you could contact me (see below) to send me the crash message (you can Ctrl+C the dialog to copy the message) and the circumstances under which it arose.

The game doesn’t handle task-switching and/or loss of focus very well. What gives?

If this is happening to you, I know it’s not much consolation, but this was only spotted on a minority of PCs I tested the game on. At this stage, I’ve no idea why that happens. All I can suggest is to try playing the game full-screen (see the in-game settings menu).

The game’s performance is terrible, how can I improve it?

Go to the Settings page from the main menu. Do you have particle rendering set to “full”? That’s probably causing the problem. Change it to “standard” or “off”.

I made a level using the editor and would like to submit it for inclusion in the game.

Great! Contact me (see below) and send me the file!

Make sure you set your “author name” in the editor so, when the level is played, everyone knows that you created it.

I set the graphics resolution to a value my monitor cannot display, and now I can’t see anything!

First of all, keep pushing the Escape key until the game exits.

Then, run the game in “safe mode”. It will reset the game’s resolution to 640x480, windowed.

If you used the installer there should be a shortcut to “safe mode” in your Start Menu. Otherwise, run the game with “safe” as a command line argument (no dashes or slashes).

I am a gamer with impaired vision and have trouble playing Impulse.

Unfortunately I did not include any settings to explicitly help gamers with limited vision.

However, it is possible to edit the Impulse.exe.config file to change all sorts of game features, including colours and font sizes.

Naturally you should be careful when editing the config file. There are plenty of settings other than colours and font sizes. Changing these could alter gameplay or even break the game entirely.

How can I contact the author?

My email address is ua.ten.tenii@ovehcin. (Don’t copy and paste that address, it’s protected from spam bots. Type it out manually.)

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     Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Australia License.