2D Alien Destroyers

We created a 2D alien fighter game as a form of entertainment and to challenge players with fast-paced, action-packed gameplay. The game allows the user to fire lasers at the moving aliens and ship.

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Inspiration

Playing video games is just something we all have always done so we thought "why not just build a game ourselves?" Though our version was more simplified it still allowed us to challenge ourselves and apply what we know.

What it does

Once the game starts, the user is able to move the fighter pilot using the 'a' and 'd' keys and can fire lasers at the aliens by pressing the space bar. A small delay occurs after you spam fire five lasers to bring a level of difficulty to the game. Every alien hit is one point added to the score while a shot to the mothership gives you 5 points. Hitting the mothership also adds more aliens to the screen allowing for more possibility for points.

How we built it

We coded the whole project using the Processing IDE in Java. The lasers and aliens were created in two classes called the main class to "spawn" them onto the screen. The artwork was created using Piskel which is an online sprite editor.

Challenges we ran into

Our main challenge for the project was perfecting the hit detection from the lasers and aliens. Our base of hit detection was using the x and y locations of both objects and using the Pythagorean theorem to pinpoint the moment of impact. A problem that we kept running into was that sometimes the lasers were going right through the sprites but we were able to figure out that the hitbox of the sprites was not correct.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting this project finished fairly quickly was an accomplishment that we are all proud of. Being able to work together and grind out this game with fairly few kinks was very surprising to us. The few problems that we ran into were solved quickly and effectively and I am so proud of my group.

What we learned

Hackathons are hard. We made a simple game so that was not that tough but seeing everybody else grinding on their projects was a huge mindblower.

What's next for 2D Alien Destroyers

We want to create a basic home screen for the application which will allow the user to pick from a variety of different arcade games.

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