Falling Stars: Explanation

Controls

In this game, you control the white square.

Use the arrow keys to move. While holding Shift, your movement speed will be split in half.

Objective

The goal of the player is to maximize their score. The score is increased by 1 every frame and by 200 when catching a star (see next section). For reference, I achieved a score of 60680 a minute ago, in which I would describe my skill/concentration level as "medium".

Stars

Touching a star will...

1. reset the star to a random position at the top of the screen
2. increase your score by 200, as mentioned in the previous
3. increase your lives by 1 (see next section)

If you miss a star, it resets without any further direct punishment.

Enemies

Touching an enemy will delete the enemy but decrease your number of lives by 1. When you run out of lives, the game is over, so you'll want to prolong this as long as you can by picking up stars and avoiding enemies.

The interval between enemy spawns is displayed at the bottom of the screen, along with your score and lives. Each time an enemy spawns, the interval is decreased by 1, leading to an exponential decrease until it stops at 0, at which point an enemy will be spawned every frame.

Differences from the assignment template

I...

• drew simple assets in GIMP, trying to use colours that were somewhat consistent with the background
• created an additional entity meant for the player to avoid, not catch
• shifted the focus of the game from catching stars to avoiding enemies
• created an entity array system to allow for more than one enemy to exist at once
• let the player move up and down instead of only left and right
• tracked an additional key (Shift) to modify the movement speed
• made the difficulty of the game increase as it went on instead of keeping it constant
• implemented a y velocity changing (stars fall faster as they get lower) and x velocity system (on the enemies)
• stopped the game when the player reached a "lose" state