OIDS

This one is an open project. The only instruction consists in two videos presenting the gameplay of the OIDS game, a block buster of the late eighties (click on the images).

As you can see, this resembles to what we made before. You are a little lander exploring a cave, and the gravity tends to let you crash to the ground. But this time, there is also enemies shooting at you, little mens that you should save by landing near them (not on them), an armor for your lander, limited amount of fuel, fuel refiles, teleporters, and much more.

You are asked to implement something strongly inspired by this game, with imagination and creativity. But given the short time that you have to implement this project, you should strive to keep modest and implement the features one after the other.

Here are some ideas:

• Several levels: You just have to pass the right set of points when creating the ground.

• Keep track of the fuel level: The Up key is ineffective when out of fuel. You may use several shapes to represent the fuel level, or write it on screen.

• Graphical hints on flat areas that are wide enough to land.

• A campaign mode where the fuel that you save on one map is credited on the next map.

• A random terrain generator. Procedural generation is very appealing, although a perlin noise may be enough. Of course, there is a lot of other interesting technics that you could leverage too.

On the path, try to learn from this experience. Think about the algorithms that you are using in your game, and try to evaluate how they behave in practice. Our game engine is not very powerful, so you will probably have to optimize your code. For each problem that you face, try to think about the possible alternatives, and how they would compare. Be prepared to justify your [algorithmic] choices during the defense.

But don’t forget: this is a game! Go and have fun implementing it!

A last word: don’t spend too much time on this project. You will have a plenty of nice programming assignments during the year.

Hall of fame

Here are some productions by the students before you.

• Lendy Mulot & Come Neyrand (2019)

• Martin Andrieux & Jean-Baptiste Döderlin (2021)

If you want your name here (it’s absolutely optional), you are welcome to return a short video of your game so that I can integrate it here. kazam is a nice program to capture a screencast, while ffmpeg can be used to convert this screencast to a gif. You can add a few sentences to describe your game if you wish