West Bank Duelling Bonus Level
The arcade version of this game, Bank Panic from Sega, is an amazing game, I can remember playing it in the arcades at Southend seafront as a teenager. I loved the fast-paced reaction/ organisation theme; which isn’t hugely different in a way to some modern mobile game concepts. Like where you’re running a bakery, baking different cakes with various different frosting for lots of angry customers. The frantic build-up of things to-do, to “organise”, makes for great gameplay. Now, obviously this isn’t as family-friendly as baking cupcakes! But still, the idea of the game is to react to who appears from behind the doors - making sure to allow at least one cash deposit for each of the 12 available doors.
There’s one thing the home versions have that the arcade version doesn’t though and that’s the duelling bonus round. Technically, the arcade version does a similar thing for all the bandits - given that their appearance in the bank triggers a visible countdown, whereas the home versions don’t do the same. Instead, they have a bonus round - and this looks and works, exactly how you’d expect! There’s no visible countdown, but the idea is that, given the morality rules of the Wild West - you can only shoot the bandits after they draw their weapons. There are also THREE of them!
It’s a simple sub-game, and really fun - again with very basic game mechanics. So, it’s another great candidate for demonstration using the free open source Phaser game framework.
- Scene: Drawing the initial scene for the bonus duelling game.
- Drawing Numbering: Drawing the unique numbers West Bank uses.
- Countdown: Managing the countdown to when the duel begins.
- Controls: Managing the controls.
- Draw Countdown: The bandits draw at random countdown timings.
- Scoring And Levels: Managing how the scoring and level/ difficulty works.
- Shot Too Soon: Managing how the game reacts when the player shoots before the bandit has drawn their weapon.
- The Finished Game: Bringing everything together, this is the full finished game.
