Ship Goes Up

How high can you fly?

Ship Goes Up is an entertaining “avoid ‘em up” for your favourite iOS device. Avoid the falling grey bars while catching the fruit to gain a high score, earn bonus lives and progress to faster and more challenging stages. The game is compatible with iPhone 3Gs, iPhone 4, iPod Touch and iPad. Features OpenFeint support to share your high score with friends.

Aim of the Game

The whole point of Ship Goes Up is to gain a high score while remaining alive, a task that starts off reasonably easy but soon gets more and more difficult.

How to Play

The trick is that the only way to lose the game is to run out of lives and be pushed off the bottom of the screen. There is no penalty for hitting a falling bar and if you have lives being pushed off the screen incurs no penalty. These simple rules, combined with bonuses for accurate flight are the key to achieving high scores and keeping the game at a playable pace.

Scoring

Every time you pass between two falling bars without hitting either of them you will be rewarded with 10 points. Do this enough times and the game will speed up to add more challenge. Collecting pieces of falling fruit also increase your score, the value being determined by their position on the screen – the lower down the screen the fruit is when collected, the more points it is worth.

Our intrepid pilot, off to collect a tasty apple

If you fail to catch falling fruit or collide with the falling bars no score is awarded.

Levels

The game progresses based on how well you play and a skilled player is able to use this to their advantage. As explained in the scoring section, successfully navigating your ship between the falling blocks results in points. In addition if you collect enough fruit the game will speed up slightly.

Repeat this process ten times and you win an extra life. The game then continues, with the gaps slightly narrower and the falling blocks slightly closer together.

To advance the speed of the game collect the fruit and fly accurately. Keep an eye on the status bar.

Lives

When the game begins you have no spare lives, there is just the single ship on the screen you control. Keeping this ship on the screen at all times is critical unless there are spare lives.

If you do die and have spare ships, a new one appears and is temporarily invulnerable. The game will also slow down slightly.

Controls and Status Bar

To control the ship simply press your finger on the screen and slide it left or right. It does not matter where on the screen your finger is, and indeed it can be advantageous to slide it up and down to get a better view of the ship as the action increases on screen. You can remove your finger from the screen and reposition it, there is no requirement for your finger to be below the ship to control it.

The status bar is shown below

The Status Bar

The status bar is positioned at the top of the screen and shows important information helpful to play. In addition to your current score and number of lives are two yellow progress bars.

Helpful software

The left progress bar shows how close to a speed increase you are. The right progress bar shows how fast the game is running, and how close to a reset back to the slowest speed you are.

Pause

The game pauses itself if you press either the lock button, home button or the game is interrupted by a phone call, etc. So to pause the game simply press the home or lock buttons on your device. When you resume the game remains paused until you tap the screen, there is then five seconds of invulnerability to allow you to adjust to the speed of the game.