Asteroid Blaster is a space adventure game for players of all ages. The player can fly freely within a bounded environment in outer space and shoot asteroids, much like the classic arcade game, Asteroids. When asteroids are shot, they break apart into smaller asteroids, and sometimes they drop minerals that the player can gather. Players can fly to these minerals and touch them to pick them up / gather them, or they can use a tractor beam to pull the minerals towards their ships.
The player will use minerals that they have gathered to purchase upgrades for their ship, such as better armor, new and more powerful weapons, and ammo for their weapons. Players will be able to fly and shoot from their own ship, or they can choose to have an AI player fly or shoot for them. Additionally, players will be able to play the game against a computer-controlled AI that will fight against the player.
The game uses primarily homemade sounds and music. It features several shaders, both vertex and fragment. It uses a lot of particle systems to make the world look pretty. It also uses billboarded sprites for explosions.
The game makes use of view frustum culling to prevent unnessecary data from being sent to the graphics card. Additionally, because the game makes heavy use of transparency, all objects are sorted back to front before being drawn.
AsteroidBlaster features an AI that will fly and shoot for the player. During the game, this can be enabled/disabled fith the F(lying) and G(unner) keys. In the future, this will be used to add additional ships to the world to allow the player to play against or alongside others.
To make the game more graphically appealing, we used a pixel shader to create a bloom effect.
AsteroidBlaster currently includes 5 weapons: Blaster, Tractor Beam, Rail Gun, Pikachu's Wrath, and the Anti-Inertia Beam. All of these guns are demonstrated in the video above.
