space pirates vs. space zombies in space!

Space Pirates vs. Space Zombies in Space! (SPvSZiS) is a real-time strategy game that takes out the micromanagement that all the other RTS games have. Here, you jump right into the heat of battle with a pre-set amount of resources (weight and money). Direct where you should put your ships and how much to spend on battle, and send them off to fight for honor!

Once in-battle, you can place bombs to either help or hurt. But beware! Once a bomb is placed, it cannot be moved. If you miscommand a healing bomb in front of your ship, they might shoot it away towards the enemy fleet!

It is your solemn duty to all that is righteous in the universe to vanquish these Zombie invaders. They've finally found a way to use space ships and since they don't have to breathe, they're becoming unstoppable! Stop them before they spread their contagion to Earth!

about the project

The Sophomore year game must be a 2D game of some sort. 3D games are not yet allowed, and students must create their own engine from scratch. For the first time, students are working on a project for the full school year, and must learn to cope with having much more challenging classes as well as spending time working on their game.

There was some difficulty finding a game team at the beginning of the semester. Here I will tell when I was on each team, and what I accomplished before leaving.

Team 1 - Low Budget Productions (Sept. - Oct.)

The original idea for a game was a physics-based 2D platformer. However, two of the team members needed to leave to focus on schoolwork. So the idea was changed to a 2D Top-Down shooter. Here I contributed an audio engine with FMOD as the API I was working off of. The team was eventually disbanded after the remaining team member and I could not reconcile our differences, and communication issues. The game was not finished.

Team Low Budget Productions was re-created next year with two of the original team members.

Team 2 - Paradia (Oct. Nov.)

The original idea for the game before I came onto the team was also a 2D sidescroller with physics-based gameplay. However, that too was scrapped in favor of a 2D Top-Down shooter, because not enough work was being finished to complete a sidescrolling platformer.

Here I created a small graphics engine with reference counting for textures, and a simple sprite animation system before I left the team. I alsosaved the team time by porting over my audio engine from my previous team.

I left this team one month after joining to help another team who also had lost another member recently. The game Team Paradia was working on was released, but is not available for download.

Team 3 - Hugely Important (Nov. 2010 - Apr. 2011)

My third and final team was the team that made this game. Here I could not re-use my audio system, since the team already had a working system based off FMOD. Instead, I worked on porting my sprite animation and texture reference counting systems over to their existing engine. After the new year, I got to work on coding a user interface and menus, as well as re-creating the input system.

Also worked on, but not included in the final product was an Xbox 360 controller input system. However, once the game was finalized as a point and click game, the 360 controller input was scrapped.

my contributions

• Graphics System
• User Interface Logic
• Game menus
• General Programming

Job: General Programmer
Does any job that need doing in the project, be it writing a major component, or writing bug fixes for already-existing code. Must be able to change the focus of their attention quickly.

screenshots