Math is the driving force behind most arcade-style games. The process of programming a game with a ship that can rotate and fire in a 360 degree arc, with missiles that accelerate and explode when they reach a target coordinate, expanding into a radius derived from the missiles power level, damaging nearby ships, and pushing them at the correct angle with a force that drops off exponentially from the distance of the center of the explosion, has given me more practice with trigonometry than all of the math homework I've ever done, and it certainly was more relevant and interesting to me.

Usually when you play these games, you don't see much of the complicated math behind them. Role-playing and strategy games might teach you a thing or two about statistics and probability, but the calculus and trigonometry behind arcade games stays hidden in a "black box".

dRive is a game about the relationship between position, velocity, and acceleration. You may remember seeing this relationship graphed out in your Intro to Calculus class. Velocity is the rate of change in position, and acceleration is the rate of change in velocity. dRive is a simple "collector/avoider" game. You are a gray square that must collect light green squares while avoiding dark green squares. The twist is that dRive is played on three screens. The first screen represents "position" the second screen is "velocity" and the third is "acceleration”. You can use the "S" key or the up and down arrows to switch between the different screens, but no matter what screen you control directly, you also control the other two screens indirectly through the derivative relationship. For instance, if you control the "velocity" screen, being on the right side of the screen moves the square on the "position" screen to the right, and being on the left side moves it to the left. It moves faster depending on how far away from the center your "velocity" square is, because that's the relationship between velocity and position. At the same time, moving to the right at all jumps your "acceleration" square all the way to the right, and moving to the left makes it jump to the left, and staying still makes it jump to the center. Since different random blocks are falling on each of the three screens, you either have to become very good at switching screens, or you need to develop an understanding of the position/velocity/acceleration relationship so you can keep all three squares out of harm’s way while concentrating on collecting points on the screen you're controlling.

If this sounds way too complicated, don't worry. For one thing it's much easier to understand once you've played the game. For another, the game practices good "flow". You start out only having to control one screen, and the others are added one at a time as you prove you can handle the game. The game even takes screens away if you start to perform poorly.

dRive was created by Twig Games as an entry into the 2008 Casual Game Design Competition
 
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