Turmac Roll (Flash)

Turmac Roll is a fun little game where you play as a Turmac as it rolls over hill and dale eating berries. The only things to watch out for are tree stumps and grass ridges; if you hit either of these, it's game over!

I'm hungry

How to Play

You can play Turmac Roll in three levels: Easy, Medium or Hard. On Easy, your score will be 1x the value of each berry. On Medium, you get 2x the value. On Hard, you get 3x the value. Brand new players may find Easy or Medium useful for learning the controls, but should move on to Hard for better scoring.

The object of the game is to grab as many berries as possible to earn points. You will also earn points for just rolling along: in Easy you get 1 point every few yards, in Medium 2 points, and in Hard 3 points.

Controls

This game is played using the arrow keys. Press any arrow key to start rolling. Press Right to speed up the Turmac and Left to slow it down. (You do not need to hold down the Right arrow key to maintain your speed.) Press Up to jump.

Obstacles

The biggest enemies in this game are the tree stumps. Whether it be a big one (like in the screenshot above) or a little one, as soon as you run into one of them it's game over. Likewise with the grass ridges. The nice, rounded hills cannot hurt you, but every now and then you'll see a solid, vertical "wall" of grass that you have to leap over. Don't worry about the patches of mud, they are purely cosmetic and have no impact on the Turmac.

Berries

Different berries will give you a different amount of points, based on the berry and what level you are playing on. The general rule of thumb is that the more points the berry is worth, the rarer it is that you will see one during your game. Here are the berries and their point values:

	Easy	Medium	Hard	Probability
Sniddberry	1	2	3	~74%
Loveberry	2	4	6	~7.1%
Red Chiaberry	4	8	12	~5.7%
Conkerberry	8	16	24	~4.3%
Voidberry	15	30	45	~3.6%
Fishberry	25	50	75	~2.4%
Jumbleberry	50	100	150	~1.3%
Super Juicy Berry	75	150	225	~0.7%
Unguberry	100	200	300	~0.45%
Aquaberry	200	400	600	~0.15%

Strategy

First of all, turn off the sound. The little springy noises are quite distracting the the "thunk" of hitting an obstacle is demoralizing.

It can be tempting to just keep your finger on the Right arrow and jump every now and then when you need to, but this will only get you so far in the game. The key to getting a high score is knowing when to slow down a little to grab those rare berries in between hills that you would roll over if you were going at full speed. It's all about establishing a balance, keeping your finger on the Right arrow for the majority of the time, but pressing the Left arrow key to slow down on occasion. But at the same time you need to be able to maintain enough momentum to leap over tree stumps and ravines.

Grass ridges and tree stumps are fairly easy to avoid when they come on their own, but things get more difficult when they appear in groups. Every now and then in Hard mode you will get a small tree stump, then a large one, then another small one. In these cases the best tactic I've found is to try to time your jump so that you land on the top of the large stump, like so:

There will usually be a berry you can push off the large stump to grab, so that is an extra bonus. The reason it's better to try and time it like this is that if you leave it a bit too late to jump, you'll clear the large stump but will still land with plenty of time to jump the final stump. Whereas if you aim for the gap in between them and miss you'll go head-first into a stump. This pattern will appear much more frequently around the 3,000 point mark and beyond, though if you can get to that point I'm sure you can deal with whatever the game throws at you.

Video

Game Info