Shooting Gallery

Shooting Gallery

Find the pictures that match the words

Upgrade your crossbows and hit the ballons

Find the pictures that match the words

Upgrade your crossbows and hit the ballons

Game description

In brief

Learning objective

In Shooting Gallery, players train their vocabulary and reading skills. Simultaneously, they will practice their ability to overview a lot of data and sort out the relevant. The players will also need to work together and help each other in order to be successful.

Game objective

Each round of the game consists of two parts. In the first part, the players have to locate all the words amongst the pictures on the playing board. Also, the faster the players find the words, the more gold balloons will appear in the second part of the round which can prove to be essential for completing the round. In the second part of the round, the goal is to destroy all balloons before just one of them reaches the crossbows on the right side of the screen.

Attributes

Age 8+

15 Minutes

Language

Competetive

Detailed description

Gameplay

Finding words

In the first part of each round, every player has three words in front of them. The players need to find a depiction of these words as quickly as possible among the more than 100 pictures in the middle of the playing board. When the players believe that they have located the depiction of one of the words, they simply need to drag the shield that is located next to the three words and drop it onto the picture. If the player is correct, the picture will disappear from the playing board and the word on their list will be greyed out. If the chosen picture does not represent one of the player’s three words, the picture will remain on the playing board and the word will stay written in the same way.
The row of ten golden balloons at the side of the screen is a time indicator. The more time that the players spend on finding the words, the more balloons golden balloons will disappear. If all ten balloons become transparent before the players have managed to locate all the words, all pictures that are not on any of the players’ word lists disappear leaving only the pictures that the players should have found. To advance to the next part of the round, the players simply need to drag and drop their shield onto the remaining pictures. The number of golden balloons that are still lit up when the players have located all the words equals the number of golden balloons that will appear in the second part of the round. Shooting golden balloons in the second round of the game will reward the players with crucial gold coins.

Shooting balloons

After completing the first part of the round, the players are led to a new screen with four crossbows on the right side of the screen. Each crossbow has its own colour representing each of the four players. Balloons will start to appear on the left side of the screen and fly in the direction of the crossbows, and the crossbows will automatically begin to shoot arrows towards the balloons. If the crossbows manage to destroy all balloons, the players advance to the next level. If just one of the balloons reaches the crossbows, however, the game is over.
When almost all of the balloons are destroyed, one larger balloon with a number inside will appear. For every hit that this balloon suffers, the number will be reduced by one. This balloon will not pop until its number has reached 0.

Collecting gold coins

If the players have managed to find the words in the first part of the round fast enough, some of the balloons appearing on the screen will be golden. Each time a golden balloon is destroyed by an arrow, all players are rewarded with a gold coin. The players can use these gold coins for upgrading their crossbow in different ways.

The crossbow

From the beginning of the second part of the round (shooting balloons), each crossbow is able to shoot five arrows before having to reload. The reload takes a couple of seconds during which no arrow will be fired from the crossbow. Furthermore, regular arrows will disappear after hitting a balloon making them unable to destroy more than one balloon each. In order to have a chance of successfully overcoming later rounds where increasingly more and faster-flying balloons will appear, the players will need to have collected enough gold coins to upgrade their crossbows.

Buying upgrades for the crossbows

For the gold coins that the players have collected, players are able to buy upgrades for their crossbows. If the players should manage to successfully destroy all balloons, the upgrades that the players bought for their crossbows will be saved for future rounds. There are four different types of upgrades for the crossbows.

For the price of 20 gold coins, the players can buy arrows that pierce the balloons and continue forward destroying any other balloons in their path.

For the price of 5 gold coins, the players can buy arrows that create an explosion after hitting a balloon. These explosions will destroy any other balloons that are close enough.

For the price of 1 gold coin, the player’s crossbow will be able to shoot an additional arrow before having to reload.

For the price of 4 gold coins, the players can buy this upgrade that will make the arrows fly faster and thereby reach their goal quicker.

For each time the player presses +, they purchase one of the selected upgrades. By pressing -, they sell one of the purchased upgrades and get the gold coin value of this update returned to them.

The numbers (e.g. 000/10) just below the illustrations of the type of upgrade indicate how many upgrades of this type the players have bought and can buy. For example, upgrading the speed of the arrows once will make the arrows fly faster, but buying an additional upgrade of this kind will make the arrows fly even faster. The number “000/10” means that the players are able to buy up to ten updates of this kind which would make the arrows fly extremely fast.

Increasing difficulty

The game consists of up to twelve rounds. The difficulty of the first part of each round (finding words) will remain the same throughout the game. In regard to the second part of the rounds (shooting balloons), however, for every round that the players complete, the number and the speed of the balloons will increase making this part of the round increasingly difficult to win.

Detailed description

Settings

Text and Sound

This is the easiest difficulty level of the game. In this variation, the players will be shown each word in written form and also have the word read out to them by the game.

Text

In this version, the players are only presented with the written form of the words that they have to find depicted amongst the eight images in front of them.

Scrambled Text

This version of Word Circus is the one with the highest difficulty level. In this version, the players are only shown the words in a written form where the letters have been scrambled. This means that the players will have to rearrange the letters of the words in their heads in order to make out the meaning of the words and to find the correct image.

Start

After choosing which of the three variations of the game to play and pressing “Start”, the players are led to a new screen. Here, each player who wishes to participate in the game needs to press the “Join” button once. The button will then light up indicating that the player is participating. Should this player reconsider, simply press the “Join” button again and the button will no longer be lit up. The players also have to decide at which speed the incorrect images should disappear. There are three different speed levels to choose from: Fast (represented by the cheetah icon), Medium (represented by the dog icon) and Slow (represented by the tortoise icon). The faster the speed level, the faster the incorrect images will disappear making it easier for the players to find the correct image. However, the more incorrect images that have disappeared before choosing the correct image, the fewer points the player will receive for a correct answer.