Playing Rolly Vortex on a School Chromebook: Controls, Saves and Sound

Rolly Vortex is a small HTML5 game, and rollyvortex.org serves it straight from its own domain. That makes it simple to play on a school Chromebook, a laptop or a phone. Here is what that means for loading, controls, saving and the buttons on screen.

What loads when you press Play

The game is built with Construct 2, a tool for 2D browser games. When you press Play the page loads a few files from rollyvortex.org: the game engine, the game's own data, a set of sprite images and three sounds — the music, the point chime and the crash. There is no plugin, no installer and no account. The game is drawn in portrait, 720 by 1280, and the site scales it to fit the player.

Keyboard or touch

On a Chromebook or laptop, click inside the game once so it has keyboard focus, then use the Left and Right arrow keys. If the keys stop working, you have probably clicked outside the game — click it again. On a phone or tablet, drag your finger left and right anywhere on the game; the ball follows.

Where your progress is saved

Rolly Vortex saves three things in your browser's local storage: your best score, your diamond count and the balls you have unlocked. In practice:

• The same browser on the same device remembers all three.
• Another device, another browser or another Chrome profile starts from zero.
• Incognito windows, guest mode and clearing site data wipe the save.

There is no cloud save and no sign-in, so if you play on a shared school computer, your best score may belong to whoever used it before you.

The buttons

On the title screen: the music note (bottom left) turns music on and off, the speaker (bottom right) does the same for sound effects, and the striped ball in the middle opens the ball menu. The Game Over screen adds a blue restart arrow and a green leader board button. The leader board is a fixed list inside the game, not an online ranking.

Sound

Browsers do not play sound until you have clicked the page, so the music starts after your first click. If you want it quiet in class, the two buttons in the corners switch music and effects off separately.

If it stutters

Rolly Vortex is light, but a Chromebook playing video in another tab can drop frames, and in a reflex game a dropped frame can cost the run. Close other tabs, turn off battery saver, and use the full-screen button under the game for a bigger tunnel.

Is it blocked at school?

The game is an ordinary web page on rollyvortex.org, with nothing to download, so it opens wherever normal websites open. If your school's filter blocks the site, only the network's administrator can change that.

Back to the tunnel: play Rolly Vortex, or read five habits for a higher score.