Screenshot of Space Invaders clone game play, Jayson Ash Game Developer Studio, Sept 10, 2019
Space Invaders is another great classic video game. This game was one of the most popular games in its era. I made a space invaders clone and the process was quite an eye opener. At first glance I thought this game was very simple. Space Invaders had a lot of small details engineered into the game that I didn't realize it had.
So let me explain how the game works. For now there is only 1 level, which is a development environment for building the game faster.
In the current state of the game there are some important props to notice. Here is a list of them:
- Alien 1 – These aliens are at the top of the formation. They are the smallest targets and most difficult to hit out of all the aliens. They are also worth the most points.
- Alien 2 – These aliens are in the 2nd and 3rd rows of the formation. These aliens are not so small, but farther away from the player. They reward a decent amount of points when hit by a shot from the player.
- Alien 3 – These aliens are the two bottom rows of the formation. They are closest to the player and easiest to hit, so they provide the least amount of points.
All three types of aliens will shoot at the player if they are the lowest in their column of the formation. The aliens shoot at random intervals.
- Shields – The player can duck behind the protection of shields to avoid the barrage of alien shots.
- UFOs – A UFO will fly across the screen on a regular interval timer. UFOs give random score rewards when hit by the player's shots.
- Player ship – The player character moves left and right and can fire. I added some touch controls as an exercise to explore mobile-friendly user interfaces. The touch buttons are capsule-shaped and they're embedded into the play screen. The buttons on the left and right move the player to the left and right respectively. The button in the middle is the fire button.
Each formation of aliens constitutes a level. After all the aliens have exploded the player advances to the next level. There's only one level so it repeats over and over again. In the future I may add more levels, but in the meantime feel free to make the high score.
Space Invaders Q & A
Why did I create this project?
I created this project to prove my development chops. Creating a project based on fairly strict requirements demonstrates skill with dedication.
What was the most interesting thing about creating this project?
The most interesting thing about creating this project is the development of a new tool. The tool allows the simulation of pixels on the screen using three-dimensional cubes. I created this tool to enable quick development of graphics. This tool allows for animation as well. The animations process per pixel. By pixel I really mean virtual pixel in that each pixel is actually a cube in-game. This allows for future-proofing the artwork for when screen resolutions continue to increase.
What part of this project was the most challenging?
The only challenging part was getting the physics appropriately detecting collisions. The new tool was the cause of the physics issue. The rest of the project went together fairly quickly and uneventful.
How did you design this project and why did you design it this way?
I designed a tool to allow for quickly building assets. I built it this way to allow for quick development of assets in future projects. I plan to continue adding more features to this tool in the future. I will evolve this tool into something that I can use for all my projects.
What features would you like to add to this project?
I would like to add more to the levels to make the game progress. I would like to add a database storage for the high scores. All players could then contribute to the competitive interactivity within a community. This is actually pretty easy, but I'm limited on time. Development of this will take away from other projects that I'm working on. I will do this at some point in the future as time permits.