Space Defenders

Space defenders is a top down 2d arcade style space shooter game created in Pygame. Shoot asteroids and aliens to increase your score.

Controls:

• WASD or Arrows to control the ship
• Cursor to steer the ship
• LMB to shoot
• Space to boost/dash
• ESC to close the game

Scoring:

• Aliens: +100
• Asteroids: +10

Powerups:

• Health Boost: Increases health by 5-10
• Overheal: Increases health by 5 but can heal past the max health by 5
• Dash: Temporarily replaces boost with a dash that launches you forwards giving you invincibility while dashing
• Shield: Temporarily creates a shield around the player that absorbs 2 hits from anything

Attribution:

• Ship: Top down renders from various tilt angles and pixelated in Photoshop
• UFO: Top down render and pixelated in Photoshop
• Asteroids: Pixelated in Photoshop
• Fonts: Neotriad & Stormax
• Shield: Pixelated and modified in Photoshop
• Enemy movement inspired by Dr. Kimberly Voll's raycast approach from her "Less is More: Designing Awesome AI" talk about ROCKETSROCKETSROCKETS with some adjustments to meet our needs

Disclaimer about Generative AI usage:

We used ChatGPT paired with stackoverflow posts to assist us with math throughout this project (specifically to help us get started and debug collisions and our player controller)

Pros:

• Sped up our development process and allowed us to implement the majority of the features we wanted

Cons:

• Frequently made mistakes and required us to thoroughly check and tweak code it assisted us with

How to play:

• Download the binary for your respective OS and run (extract it if necessary)

• Since our game is not signed you may need to allow it to run:
  • On MacOS press open anyway in Settings -> Privacy & Security
  • On Windows press Run in any dialog that appears

Created by Christian Reynolds, Brendan Reilly, and Spencer Trautz