This document describes the process of developing a space shooter game. It details how the creator designed sprites like a ship and enemies, created animations and movement scripts, programmed powerups and different enemy behaviors, developed multiple levels and backgrounds, and designed a boss fight with three stages. The creator added features like menus, HUD elements, and sound effects to complete the game.

1. Ben White Task 2
To begin, I firstly created a simple sprite similar to the sample sprite in the video.
However, I wanted to create something unique and be creative, so I began production of a proper
ship. Here is how it began

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This is the first model of the ship I created
Here is the final model of the ship, complete with a brand new recolour, weapons and a unique
design.

3. Ben White Task 2
Once complete, I was able to duplicate the sprite and create a frame by frame animation for it. The
animation shows the flames on the ship flickering.
This is my first code for my finalized ship. This is a basic movement script to allow my ship to move
around the game world.

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The above images convey my ship moving around the game
I then went on to create a background for the ship. The fi rst creation was just a simple, singular star
background which moved slowly.

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Then I went on to use a parallax method in which I created 3 backgrounds and overlapped them all. I
then made each background move at its own different and unique speed to create a sense of a large
3D world. I believe this would be vital as my game is set in space which is extremely vast.
I then went on to create enemies for the game. I coded the movement and spawning of the ships in
a way they would move horizontally to the left, spawn in groups of 3 and fire at the player. I had also

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created a script which allowed the player to fight back by shooting. The lazer projectiles would be
destroyed in they hit the player/enemy, but none were coded to be destroyed as of yet.

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I then went on to improve the explosion sprite as I wanted something that looked much better

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After this, I went on to create my second enemy. This enemy moves vertically after it fires to try to
evade the players attacks and it fires a strong vertical -line projectile which can be quite destructive if
it hits the player.
I began to notice my game was becoming quite difficult, so I needed to program something to aid
the player and I thought I would have a go at creating a health power up. This power up flies across
the screen quickly and if it collides with the player, the players ship is repaired by 50 HP. The sprite
may be changed at a later date.

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I then created a more adventurous second powerup. This one changes the instance of the player to
the player with a shield over it, once the player has collided with the shield powerup. This effect
lasts for a few seconds, but the player is invincible whilst it is in effect.
Here is what the game looks like now. There have been a number of improvements:
 The Heads Up Display has been improved to specify the score and shield variables
 Shield is limited to 200 so that the health power up will not cause the ship to become
extremely strong
 A second enemy type now flies across the screen
 An improved background has been created. The desert mountains convey a broken planet
being invaded by the enemy

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I have now created a start-up screen. So that players are not just immediately thrown into the game
and can start when they like by pressing enter.
I then wanted to create another weapon the player
could fire. This would be missles and they would move a
lot faster than lazers, but have a delay between shots
and only one would fire at a time.

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I then went on to improve the start screen by adding a better animation and instructions on how to
play. A future update will add a tips system which will display various tips on this menu.

12. Ben White Task 2
I then went on to create a third enemy type by myself. I wanted to create a mini -boss character, so
this enemy fires 4 large laser beams at once which can deal a lot of damage. I have also
implemented its own health system similar to the players so that it is tougher to take down and does
not die in one hit. It also moves very slowly and has a similar movement pattern to the second
enemy where it shoots and moves vertically to a new position.
After the mini boss, I then went to work on creating spawner which would create turrets and towers
that would move across the screen and shoot .

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Here, the top picture is on the turret, and the
turret sits ontop of the tower which can be
found underneath . There is also an animated
sprite for when the turret gets destroyed by the
player. I have set up an invisible ‘spawner’
object which tells the game to create a tower
every couple of seconds or so.

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Here, I created a 4th enemy type. I wanted this one to be different
from the others, so it does not fire and attempts to purposely
kamikazie and crash into the players ship to cause severe damage.
They are smaller, but faster and pose a big threat.
After the last enemy, I wanted to work on adding levels. I plan to make 3 into total. This level has a
new background to show progression and enemys spawn a little bit quicker. I plan for my third room
to be the boss room.

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Before working on the large task of creating a boss, I wanted to create a title screen for my game as
well as a title itself. It is called ‘swarm’ due to the large amount of enemies and the enemies are
inspired by wasps, which come in swarms. On this screen, I have also created a tile set in which I
thought would be good to establish the structure seen on-screen. This set contains a block, two
slopes and a half-block.

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Before working on the boss, I also added a tips section to the second menu. This tip will change each
time the screen is loaded due to the code above.

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Stage 1 Boss
After this, I began to work on the boss sprite. I needed it to be gigantic as I wanted the boss to look
tough. After I assured the size was big enough, I finalized the design and set up the colli sion mask.
Then I began work on
some complex code.
This image shows all the
events in my first boss
object which contains a
lot of scripts and alarms.
I didn’t think it would look right if I left my boss sprite as it is, and then just explode when its health
reaches zero. I needed to add separate stages to the boss battle in the sense that its instance would
change and it would become more challenging as the battle went on. The bosses would begin to fire
their weapons faster depending on how close they were to death. I also wanted the boss to look like
it had sustained damage throughout the fight. With the instance_change() code, I was able to set up
3 bosses with slightly different sprites. The first was a completely clean boss, and the second and
third were set on fire and look like they have take medium and large damage respectively. The two
other verisions of the boss can be seen below.

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Stage 2 Boss
Stage 3 Boss
The backs of the ship have less detail due to them not being seen within game. I then began to work
on some projectiles for them to fire.

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Out of the two large cannons on both sides of the ship, these lazer projectiles will fire out. They are
quite large and can be challenging to avoid and they do a lot of damge to your ship. The ship will
then these slightly smaller projectiles below. These are a bit weaker than the other projectiles but
come from the front weapon of the ship. These lazers both follow the sort of codes for the first
enemies lazers. Once, fired, the lazers will move to the position the player was last at as soon as the
projectile spawns to make it look like the boss is targeting the player ship.

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After a lot of coding, here is what the final boss fight looks like, complete with each stage.

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At the end of the battle, the ship create tons of explosions toward the centre to show that the boss
has been defeated and the battle is over. With this, I began to work on a victory screen, but first I
had to implement some more sounds.

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Here is my finalized list of sounds. I have used a lot of sounds I created myself during my sound
development part of the course last year such as ‘battle’ and ‘explore’, but have borrowed some
sounds such as ‘blast1’ and ‘Zap’. ‘Explore’ plays in the menu whilst ‘battle’ plays in levels 1 and 2
and in level 3, ‘Battlemusic2’ plays.

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Here is the finalized win screen. This level only displays once the boss has been defeated. In it, the
star background moves slowly to the left, the green explosions move just like the explosion particle
systems previously used, the trophy increases and decreases in size and the ‘You Win!’ text flashes.

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Then I had to work on a way to get the player to move on to the next level, so I thought of creating
and object with a collision event. The sprite below appears as soon as the players score reaches 30.
Once the player collides with the object, the player will be taken to the next level.

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With a win screen created, I also had to work on a ‘Game over’ screen for when the player dies. For
it, I used the system code, which is used in my game to spawn enemies at different times, and
slightly modified it to make the enemies spawn much quicker so it looks like a swarm. Also, the
Game over text flashes between red and black to show loss as the black blends in with the
background.

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