Whaaack!: survive the orchard
(android, games, open-source) 1 min read by Bartosz Pachołek
A whack-a-mole game where the moles are fruit and your score is the milliseconds you last. Finished, and on its way to Google Play.
Whaaack! is a whack-a-mole game for Android, except the moles are fruit and they are getting away. It is finished and being prepared for release on Google Play.
How it plays
Fruit pops out of a 4x4 board and you hit it before it goes back down. Each fruit that escapes is a strike; three strikes end the run. Two fruit cycle at first, a third joins in the fifth gear, a fourth in the eleventh and a fifth in the seventeenth.
The score is how many milliseconds you survived. No multipliers, no combos. Every four seconds fruit arrive faster and live shorter, down to 580 ms at top speed, and it never levels off. Play Games sign-in is optional; signed-in ranked runs post to global and weekly leaderboards.
Built to never stutter
Gameplay does not use Compose at all. A GameSurfaceView owns a dedicated render thread and draws each frame on a GPU-backed canvas from lockHardwareCanvas(). The main thread only forwards touches, through a lock-free queue, and the GameEngine is pure simulation with no Android types. Menus are Compose; a live run never causes a recomposition.
On your wrist
There is a Zepp OS edition for Amazfit watches: a 3x3 board on unlit black for AMOLED screens, its own leaderboard, badges at 30, 60, 90 and 120 seconds and a personal-best trophy.
Free, with one purchase
The game is free. A short full-screen ad may appear between runs, at most one every couple of minutes; a single one-time purchase removes them. The source is on GitHub under the BSD 3-Clause license.