Protect Planet

The user plays as a shield restricted to the y-axis to protect the Earth. Originally, the movement controls felt really slow and sluggish so I opted to polish this by implementing a decay function, making the controls feel much nicer and it feels like you are floating in space. The player must use the shield to block the comets from reaching Earth, these will speed up and spawn in quicker succession over time. Comets will remove a life and, of course, in the event that you have no lives, the game is over. The playtesting and QA phase of this game’s development process found that after one game, it’s just the same again. So I had spent some time implementing a new ‘research rocket’ which you must let them hit the Earth so they can safely land, rewarding the player with a generous score. Of course, hitting a rocket with the shield will also lose a life. This made the game a lot more fun for the playtesters because they had to manage the difference between fast rockets that must hit Earth, and a constant stream of comets that must be destroyed.

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Protect Planet was the first game I had ever fully finished. I had started this for the Programming 2D Games module in my first year of university. The game comes complete with 8-bit sounds, a basic UI, a full game loop, and even a very simple difficulty curve. This entire process was a huge learning curve for me, I hadn’t really used C++ before this, I had never made any ‘complete’ assets before this, and I had never really thought about music or sound design. Protect Planet taught me a lot about the lower-level understanding of game mechanics and how to get a game running in an interface like SFML. I had begun to understand the object-oriented paradigm, the importance of interaction, and the C++ language as a whole.

 

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