Concept:
My midterm project was inspired by classic shoot ‘em up games like Space Invaders, Galaxian/Galaga, or the countless variations that followed. These games had a huge impact on video games and pop culture as a whole, and have an iconic style that brings back childhood memories for many. I wanted to try and emulate this retro aesthetic and provide an enjoyable take on the space shooter genre.
I am still undecided on the specific end goal of my game, since I can see the appeal of both an endless rush to see how long you can survive as opposed to clearing stages and progressing. I am leaning towards the former and having enemies speed up as time progresses, as an homage to how in Space Invaders the game would speed up since less enemies being on screen meant the machine was able to run faster. Either way, I intend to provide a simple experience of piloting a spaceship and taking on enemy ships while dodging obstacles like asteroids and comets.
Design:
As previously mentioned, I wanted to mainly focus on pixelated sprites to fit the time period. The backgrounds and menus, on the other hand, will probably be more modern by comparison for the sake of providing a better overall experience. The gameplay itself will get harder as the player progresses, through things like having more enemies that move/shoot faster, and maybe gradually adding in obstacles as you reach certain checkpoints.
So far, I have created classes for the player character and enemy ships, the bullets being fired, and a game class to keep track of the ongoing round. The ship and bullet classes contain attributes like their position and movement, current sprite, health and fire rate, etc. The game class keeps track of the time and score, has arrays for enemies and obstacles, and keeps track of the game state (e.g. ongoing, win, loss).
Challenges:
- Keeping track of scenes being displayed for menus, game levels, win/loss screens, etc.
- Detecting collisions during gameplay, determining whether the collision needs to be addressed, and handling it accordingly (e.g. destroy enemy ship on contact with the player’s bullet)
- Figuring out how to display menus in an intuitive manner, and handling clicking on buttons or alternatively navigating via keyboard inputs.
Risk Prevention:
I have started working on some helper functions for generic tasks like reading/handling keyboard inputs at different points in time, as well as checking for collisions between objects through rough circular hitboxes (in order to use radii as a measure). What I am still working on is coming up with a way to handle mouse interactivity on menus and putting it in one helper function.