In Asteroid Blaster, 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.
The game makes use of view frustum culling to prevent unnecessary 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 at the player and asteroids.
To make the game more graphically appealing, we used a pixel shader to create a bloom effect.
AsteroidBlaster currently includes eight weapons: Tractor Beam, Blaster, Homing Missiles, Electricity Gun, Charging Rhino, Bomb, Charge Cannon, and Rail Gun. All of these guns are demonstrated in the video above.
When players spawn, they have three lives. New lives may be purchased between levels. When a player runs out of lives, the game is over, and the player is taken back to the menu.
For a more detailed explanation, see Sterling's Senior Project Writeup.
