Personal Space Invaders Final Presentation
A Reflection on Decisions Past
Space Escape by Personal Space Invaders
David Garcia, Trevor Radcliffe, Westley Schrack
When we planned to make Space Escape we envisions a fun top down shooter where the player must escape from the level by completing various objectives. The two things we wanted in a game before I even began to think of an idea for a game was xbox controller support and enemy AI. Both of these desires were easily completed with our final idea. We do not feel our goals for our game were overly ambitious. As far as the high-bar goals listed on the design document only a few of the goals were reached but all the base-goals were completed.
The part we are most pleased with in the game is the player movement. Depending on whether you are using a mouse or a controller movement is calculated differently and finding out the way to do each was a fun exercise. Pathfinding also works very well, We used Aron Granberg’s A* Pathfinding Library. The library works by scanning the level for obstacles and creating a grid of possible squares that the enemy can occupy, the A* algorithm then calculates the most efficient route from the origin to the destination.
As far as what we did do we feel like we did a lot. Level design was a big part of what we did. Player control and enemy targeting were also very important. We tried to make our game fairly easy to learn, but it comes off as difficult the first time you play it. The game itself is fairly balanced and the required objectives are reasonable while skirt the edges of tedious.
As far as stuff we didn’t do that we planned for, everything we planned to do was accomplished. This isn’t to say that we didn’t give ourselves enough things to do. Instead, we knew exactly how much time we had and how long certain things would take. On the other hand, if we did have more time there are a few things we would have liked to do. We would have liked to make the menus a bit nicer and add a pause menu. We also would have liked to add another type of moving enemy rather than have one moving enemy and one stationary, but for some reason the game likes to lag a lot when you have more than 4 pathfinding enemies on the screen at the same time, at least in the unity program. We would have liked better particle effects because they can make an ok game look great. A third level could have also been a nice addition in which you have to fight a boss in order to escape, which would probably make the player feel as if they actually accomplished something and actually escaped something, but we didn’t have the time or resources to do so.
If we could do the entire project over again, we would spend more time earlier in the project working on things so we could have maybe added a few extra things, not to say we didn’t spend enough time working on it at all times. The art direction could maybe be changed, but then again none of us can actually draw so this would probably be the best you are going to get.
Overall, we are quite pleased with our result, for a group of first time video game programmers it could have been much worse. A lot of the thanks goes to the Internet for their help with ways of doing certain things in game and how to fix certain bugs, without them the game would certainly not be anywhere near the level it is. We feel we learned a lot about C# and Unity on this project, two subjects of which we knew almost nothing about before this class.
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