A new remake of a revolutionary game
Space Invaders is a 1978 arcade game created by Tomohiro Nishikado. It was manufactured and sold by Taito in Japan, and licensed in the United States by the Midway division of Bally. Within the shooter genre, Space Invaders was the first fixed shooter and set the template for the shoot 'em up genre. The goal is to defeat wave after wave of descending aliens with a horizontally moving laser to earn as many points as possible.
The game has been designed using keyboard controllers as the user uses the cursor keys to operate the ship and to fire bullets at enemy ships. In addition, while a game is in progress the player can also choose whether to play with background music or not. Using Allegro's libraries, the player can enjoy both a brilliant graphic interface and high quality soundtrack reproduction. Here it's going to be explained the different parts of which the game developed is composed. Please pay special attention to the module Tips and important details.
Initially the game displays data about the game designer company, the date of creation and release, and copyright information as shown in the following images.
After completing the game presentation, the main game menu is displayed. In order to continue, the player must press the ENTER key. Next, the instruction screen is displayed, informing you which keys to use to move the ship and fire. This menu appears a suitable time for the player to read it comfortably and then disappears.
After viewing the instructions, a new menu is displayed where the user can choose the difficulty of the game. Using the cursor arrows the user can choose in three game modes:
- Easy mode: the ship of the player has five lifes.
- Medium mode: the ship of the player has three lifes.
- Hard mode: the ship of the player has one lifes.
The difficulty is selected by pressing the ENTER key. There are eight sublevels in which the lifes of the enemies are increased. In each level the player can choose with how many lifes wants to play. Before starting a game, the player is informed of the level in which he is going to play.
This point is when the game begins, the player's ship starts at the center of the screen. Use the cursor keys to move the ship and use the space bar to shoot the villains. Be careful, the villains will be continually shooting at the player to try to kill him. Fortunately there are a number of shields that can help in certain situations.
The following image shows a vision of the course of the game.
The game can finish in three ways:
- The player destroys all enemies and is feeble to have done so.
- Leaving the game by pressing the ESCAPE key.
- The player loses all his lifes and is informed that he has lost.
At the end of the game, a new menu is displayed in which you are given the opportunity to play again, choosing freely between each other and not. To do this, the player must press the ENTER key.
As explained earlier, the game has a set of very high quality music tracks. While the game is in progress, the player can choose whether or not to listen to music. No soundtrack is played by default. If the user wants to play music he must press the ALTG R key of the keyboard. The player can choose from a total of eight tracks. After each beat, a new track is played until the last one is reached. When you press again, playback is disabled and you return to the default settings.
Since the player can at any time stop the execution of the game and then resume it, the feature of being able to pause the game has been added. Pressing the TAB key pauses the game and stops the background music if one is active. To resume the game, the player must press the key TAB again.
After asking the player if he wants to play again and answering no, the final credits of the game are shown. These credits show the name of the game with the developer company and the year of creation, the soundtrack used referencing their original game development companies in order to garantee the copyright.
The following software has been used for the elaboration of the project:
- Codeblocks (version 17.12)
- Allegro libraries (version 4.7)
- Xpadder
- Photoshop CS6
- Paint 3D
- Camtasia
- Sony Vegas Pro (version 10.0)
Some tips at the time of executing the program:
- To listen to music it is recommended not to make consecutive pulsations since the program is very sensitive to keyboard interruptions, causing problems when playing the music tracks.
- To run the program use the Script.bat file, it's in the Release, and don't start SpaceInvaders.exe.
- Pause the game before minimizing it by pressing the TAB key.
- Press ALTGR key to play the soundtrack list.
In order to check the correct functioning of the program, different tests have been carried out. These tests have consisted in the accomplishment of diverse games testing the different modes of departure, the response of the keys, the quality of the sound effects and of the musical pitas. It has also been proven that the pause mode of the game and that the launch script runs on cmd console without any problem.
In addition, tests have been performed using a PS2 controller configured with Xpadder instead of the keyboard in order to test usability and give users a perspective closer to desktop games. The ps2 command configuration is shown below:
- Space key - Cross button
- ALTGR key - Triangle button
- Enter key - Start button
- TAB key - Select button
- ESCAPE key - L button
- Cursor keys - crosshead buttons
To execute the program you must go to the directory where it is saved and click Script.bat.
The release provided is a file with zip extension where the folder "images", the folder "soundtrack" have been compressed, the folder "soundeffects", a dll file to load the Allegro files in your computer, the executable file of the game and a script to run it in the cmd console. Do not delete the folders or anything they save because otherwise the game will not work properly. Besides, the release contains the Xpadder files of the PS2 controller configuration used to test the game.
Watch the trailer of the video game here
