breakpoint

While exploring a new planet, aliens ambush humanity's base. With 5 minutes until the rocket is ready, equip powerful vanguards, defend your tower, eliminate the Dravok, and secure your escape!

Comment 1

Inspiration

I was inspired by recently watching the movie Interstellar again. It got me curious about space exploration and sparked the idea for a space-themed game, and I always thought tower defense games were cool. This is the first time I have made a game so I am really happy that I chose to go with the initial inspiration that hit me! I am also pretty into art but mostly painting and sketching on canvas. So I decided designing game assets should be fun and easy, it was not.

What it does

The game is a tower defense where you have to survive for 5 minutes and kill the big boss(Dravok). If you fail to do so in time, you lose. You also lose if you let too many aliens hit your tower. You win upon killing Dravok. You have to skillfully play around your vanguard cooldowns and switch frequently to kill a wide variety of aliens.

How we built it

I built it with Next.JS and Phaser game engine. Used AWS amplify, cloudfront, s3, and of course Amazon Q.

Challenges we ran into

I had a lot of times when I was stuck on implementation, and even more frustratingly I had to refactor entire classes. It was very frustrating, but I had to simply take a break and come back ready to simplify my thinking and narrow the scope of what I was trying to fix. An example of this was that initially I put my shoot() function responsible for shooting a projectile(bullet) on the Projectile class. Now, it seems pretty nonsensical looking back, but I had to reason my way out that I need to build separate vanguard(gun) classes and implement shoot() there.
These struggles were because of my inexperience in building a game, and these growing struggles got better as time went on. I also learned to apply valuable OOP skills that I had only learned vaguely in class.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Proud that I have a fully functioning game. Most of the functionality I wanted was successfully implemented through multiple iterations. I also designed and animated all the the sprites and visual assets, which was a lot of fun. I would say a good 50% of the project dev time was spent to this because I was so engrossed by pixel art and trying to capture what I was imagining. I am really proud of the art and design for the guns, aliens, background art, everything. I am also glad that I actually had fun playing the final product.

What we learned

Learned a lot about Phaser as well as collisions, positioning on screen, and many key game development concepts. Also had fun figuring out and configuring AWS services. I also learned just how to start with an idea and build progressively towards a product. Initially my vision for the game was very complex and contained many features and systems. As I began implementing, I realized that some of the features I wanted were not quite so easy. For example, even designing sprites was a huge learning curve for me. I had started off with very detailed, complex sprite designs. I had to take a step back and realize that I had to try something new. This was a very valuable lesson as I had to manage tradeoffs between the time constraint and ideas for features and implementations. This was what ultimately helped me converge on breakpoint.

What's next for breakpoint

I wanted to add a new feature where you could answer a trivia question about space for an item or bomb that helps you against the aliens. I would also love to add a leaderboard system to make the game more social. Other than that of course would love to add and design more aliens!

Share this project:

Updates