Your main engines have malfunctioned, and you’re falling towards your final resting place at the heart of a cavernous asteroid. You’ve still got thruster control, but from the look of things that’s not going to be enough. Still, an adventurist space pilot like yourself has taken defeat so easily. It may just be prolonging the inevitable but you grab your thruster controls and brace yourself for your last ride. It’s a Long Way Down, so enjoy!

Long Way Down is an excellent beginners program to learn allegro. It’s relatively simple, but covers elements such as timing, keyboard input, fullscreen/windowed modes, text output and particles. The game will even load external wav files if you have them and add sound to the game. All you need to do is choose wav files called hum.wav that will grow louder as you get closer to the edge, jet.wav for the sound of your thrusters, and explode.wav for when you die and place them in the same directory as the executable.

Long Way Down is written by Paul Pridham aka Madgarden.