Android – Stardust Fighters

Remember Space Dragunz?

Stardust Fighters is a passion project that I have worked closely on with alumni Oliver Knight, we wanted to create something very different from Space Dragunz – a mobile-game that is marketed towards children, with one handed operation for when players are on public transport and need to stand.

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See our progress on GitHUB!

Role: Co-programmer, designer, and animator.

Engine: Unity

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The goal for this project is to create something, anything, and have it be on the Play Store, and to give regular content updates as we go along. It will also serve as a practise run for any future projects that come along.

The basic premise of Stardust Fighters is that you are part of an elite space force, known as the Stardust Fighters. Each ship is named after a dragon, giving emphasis to the cheesy ’80s vibe we are aiming for. Your role is to fend off waves of bad guys to protect Earth. Each level goes through three waves of enemies, with the possibility of earning credits to improve your ship.

The controls themselves are fairly basic – hold the mouse to guide the ship! That’s all! Shooting is handled automatically, as well as the ship’s movement.

My primary focus for this project was in coding logic. Below are a few snippets of code:

 

 

 

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Learning Outcomes (thus far):

• Ad implementation isn’t that hard at all – it is as simple as using “using UnityEngine.Advertisements;”!
• A lot of the focus for this project is in path finding, in both enemy units and the player (as the player tracks the player’s finger). In this case, using Unity’s NavMesh is incredibly powerful at making things autonomous. Imagine having to code A* from the ground up, this project would suddenly become extremely complicated!
• There’s a lot of free assets on the Unity store!

Reflection:

• Not much so far (this project is rather new), but what I can say for sure is that using assets just for prototyping has certainly helped and is something I’ll consider doing for projects going forward – it just feels so much better having something nice to look at!

What’s Next?:

• Wave-based spawning
• Currency system
• Upgrades
• Animations