Los Angeles is under attack, by trigonometric functions! OMG! Trigo-what? If I wanted to do maths, I’d go to San Francisco!! You, like, totally gotta save L.A man. Enter your name, then move your tank.

Use the left and right arrow keys to rotate, the forward and back arrow keys to move. The barrel of the tank is the little black line. That’s the front.

No, your tank can’t fire. Avoid the mathematical blobs. YEAH! The longer you live, the more points you get. A score above 100 is, like, totally AWESOME! Good luck Bro. Let me know in the comments how much you score.

This game is for Paul, who quit the comfortable life of a Brighton based software engineer, to go teach maths in Birmingham. Turns out there is a point to maths – it’s computer graphics. The L.A. theme is just because I had that picture in my collection (which I took from the Griffith Observatory), and I’m a little nostalgic about it.

Download the source code. This code should be considered licensed under the GNU General Public Licence.

You’ll need the free Flex SDK to build it, and the standalone flashplayer (or know how to embed Flash in HTML) to run it.

Once you have those, unzip the source into a directory, and run: mxmlc MathDodger.as ; flashplayer MathDodger.swf

If you are interested in ActionScript (not just for animators!), I suggest starting with the Senocular tutorial.