STUCK IN SPACE

An ASCII-art arcade shoot-em-up about defending your stranded spaceship from waves of aliens with an arsenal of six different weapons.

Developed: December 2020
Team:

• Joseph Henry Stadolnik IV (myself) - Programmer & Artist
• Gabriel Aponte - Programmer

Tools:

• Visual Studio 2019
• SFML
• Reaper
• Audacity

Programming Language: C++

My Role: Programmer & Artist
The game programming work for this project was split between my collaborator and myself, while I also handled the creation of custom assets and the game engine version we used.
My specific achievements on this project included:

• Implementing the wave generation system, which chooses pools of enemies based on a difficulty quota that increases each wave.
• Implementing all six weapons and the ability to switch between them. These were designed to have a range of different utilities.
• Implementing the ammo pickup system, where enemies drop an increasing minimum number of semi-random ammo pickups per wave and logic forces each ammo type to periodically spawn if they haven't appeared in a while.
• Creating and implementing all ASCII art used in the game, including the UI.
• Editing and customizing freely-available sound effects using Reaper and Audacity.
• Implementing the version of the Dragonfly engine used to make the game. This was done from scratch in C++ using SFML and following provided guides, but also featured several customizations:
  • Expanded collision logic.
  • Methods for simpler control of animations.
  • A method to delete all objects of a given type.
  • An expanded, handpicked palette of 34 colors.

Other Notes:
This game was made as part of IMGD 3000 Technical Game Development I, a course at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.