2014: An Asteroids Adventure

 
 

2014: An Asteroids Adventure is an attempt to combine modern object files, textures and animations to the classic arcade game, Asteroids. The user pilots a ship through a field of asteroids and attempts to shoot the asteroids down while avoiding getting hit. The asteroids will spawn with a random velocity, spin and position, but are limited to spawning on the top half of the screen. The controls are as follows:

 

    - WASD to control ship movement

    - R to reset the game

    - SPACE to shoot a laser

    - That's all there is to it!

 

Here are two side-by-side screen shots:

 
 
 

Things of note:

1. The background has been redone.

2. The player model has been redone.

3. Asteroid models has been redone.

4. Small laser (black cylinder) in the center of screen.

 

Credit for the object and texture files goes to the wonderful developers at Unity. They were originally downloaded in .vfx and .tiff formats, and were then converted into .obj and .bmp for ease of use with the provided loaders.

 

The background is a flat plane with a texture painted onto it, so the camera is static and the player is forced to stay within the boundaries with the asteroids. There is nothing drawn to the surrounding area, which is shown below.

 

 

The picture also shows that everything is drawn on the same plane. This made hit detection a bit easier as you only needed to worry about two dimensions. To accomplish the hit detection, everything was given its own bounding box. However, in an effort to be efficient the detection method is only called by the asteroids. The theory is that the only actionable effects are when an asteroid collides with a laser or the player's ship.

 

Thanks for reading!