SPACE INVADERS

 INTRODUCTION

Games are fun, game development is fun too, so one day I got interested in how space invaders worked, the cultural impact, how it changed today's game development, how a tiny accident changed the entire world.

Well before we dwell into all that, let's get to know how this game came to be.

HISTORY

Space invaders is a 1978 game designed and developed by Tomohiro Nishikado. This game was the first fixed shooter game for the shooter games genre.

It was also the first game where the enemy did some damage to you.

This game was a huge success and this made BILLIONS for the time. The cultural impact by this game was CRAZY.

GAMEPLAY

The objective of this game is simple, there is a fixed shooter in the bottom of the screen who could move around from left to right. You have to shoot the aliens that are slowly approaching you.

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Although there are multiple versions of this game, the original gameplay began with 5 rows of eleven aliens that move left and right as group, shifting downwards each time they reach a screen edge. The goal was to eliminate the aliens by shooting at them.

Since the aliens can shoot back at the player, the player gets given 3 lives, the game ends immediately as the aliens touch the bottom of the screen. The player is protected by 4 defense bunkers which get gradually destroyed as the aliens shoot at it.

As the aliens get defeated, the gameplay becomes faster and the music speeds up too. If the player defeats the aliens, another wave starts which starts lower, a loop which can continue endlessly.

There is also a score system. And it also recorded the high score.

CULTURAL IMPACT

As this game had an high score system, this became highly competitive, so much that this game actually had competitions and tournaments, you could see news

such as people getting addicted to this game and spending a lot of money on it just for the competition.

Arcades were sometimes referred to as invader stations.

Well the cheeky part about this game was the introduction of the difficulty wave in game development.

This graph is self explanatory, but as a new level starts, it is slightly easier than the ending of the previous level but it gets more difficult as time and levels pass by.

Anyway, the cheeky part of this thing is, this wave was discovered accidentally.

The developer of space invaders, Tomohiro Nishikado, imported a microprocessor for this game as this game was very pretty heavy for those times. So it took up a bit of memory to spawn in those aliens, but as the aliens got destroyed, the load on the microprocessor reduced, which made the gameplay faster and the music played fast too.

This lead to the discovery of the difficulty curves in shooter games or games in general.

Crazy how a bug could turn into a feature to change the world.

This was the game which made NINTENDO into a gaming company, so space invaders is one of the most pivotal games in the entire gaming history.

Even though there are multiple spin offs of this game till date, this would easily become one of the most revolutionary games to ever exist.

So I decided why don't I give it a try. So I coded this game.

CODING SPACE INVADERS

Now, my game doesn't have a high score system, neither does it have a lives system and that would be my fault.

Reason being, I am lazy and the game is fun by itself.

This was a quite simple game to code, so much that I had to spend more time beautifying it than to work on the game logic.

Here is some of the gameplay pictures...

The second image is where I lost with my highest score of 41700, each alien being worth a 100 points.

Well honestly, I cheesed the game as I set the player to shoot according to the refresh rate of the pc I have, and all I had to do was spam the space bar and move the shooter around (ahem! strategically, of course)

So try this code out on your pc and let me know if you beat me to this game.

You can find the code for it here.

I hope you had a good read.

Goodbye, and have a nice day...