The Super Story:

  the Making of Super Space Wars

    I had a perfect final project plan right from the beginning of November. It was wonderful, it was beautiful, and I thought it would have been something really awesome to make. I wanted to simulate a flock of birds. Well, into November, our third assignment was handed out to us. And, since Professor Ross always gives us options on what direction we would like to take our assignments, he gave us two choices: we could either make a 3D volcano, with shooting particles and such, or we could make a flock of birds. That shot my final project idea right down the nearest drainpipe and I went back to drawing board.

    About one month later, still project-less, we were all walking around the chilly downtown area of St Catherine’s, celebrating our friends birthday, heading (some walking, some stumbling) from bar to bar. Myself, being a little over the tipsy side, bumped into the side of a building (what building puts protruding brick from its sides, honestly now), and I noticed, staring me right in the face was some graffiti: it simply said "Invade". I stopped and looked at it, a bit confused as what exactly was meant by that. Generally graffiti has some kind of meaning, some kinda purpose, something to accomplish. This one however, had no apparent rhyme or reason, no signature, no nothing. Though it did accomplish something; something extravagant, something magnificent: it reminded me of Space Invaders.

    I remembered it was simple, it was basic, that it was... designed and programmed by Toshihiro Nishikado for Taito, Japan in 1978. And I started thinking, still leaning against the wall, on how it could be made harder, better, faster, stronger. As my friend pulled me from the, very comfortable at the time though I'm sure it's not now, brick wall; I realized that my entire Christmas break would be spent on making Space Invaders better, on making... Super Space Wars.

    It started out entirely in 3D. It had stars and dangerously red enemy cubes flying at you, whizzing soundlessly past your point of view. After that, came the lasers. They would fire from the bottom of the screen, where your gun would be, and it would travel down the starry night. Then I realized something else, something shocking, something that would then cause the missing of that night's homemade spaghetti dinner; that the aiming of those dual-laser beams would be extremely difficult to do, if not impossible, with simply a single click on the screen. There was no immediately apparent way to fire those pleasantly bright blue dual-lasers in any other direction except forward. And to fire them leftward and rightwards, would be far too difficult to intercept the red cubes, for one simple factor; you couldn't aim them! So, I worked non-stop reverting everything into a bird's eye view. This surprisingly didn’t take long. Thought of course I didn't completely undo everything, because I know myself too well, and I know that I'll want to try to turn it back into 3D, even if only slightly. I keep programming it in 3D, just without adding any depth, and making sure to project everything orthographically.

    So the game design progressed over the Christmas break; though slowly, very slowly as I worked over 70 hours in the thirteen days of the break, had to visit family far too much, visit old friends and best friends far too little, and of course, all the shopping. So, during the one day I did not have to work, I spent that entire day, from noon to midnight (I was tired, I slept in) working on the main bulk of Super Space Wars. I managed to set the foundation and set it up in such a way that new objects and other crazy or not-so-crazy ideas could be easily tossed in a header file and plugged into the game; such as a space ship created and designed by Matthew Glanfield.

    After the first completion of Super Space Wars, I was very very pleased. Lasers would fire, the now spherical red enemies would blow up, and everything was grand. Then I tossed in some lighting, spent a few hours on figuring out how to make each laser beam its own light source, and I completed Super Space Wars again.

    I bought it to the university, showing it off to friends and fellows students. And of course, the people want more. They want sounds, they want power-ups, they want to see better explosions, they want to cause screen-wise explosions. So, I spent a solid day running around the hallways of Brock, laptop in hand, taking comments and ideas and fixing them or adding them right there on the spot. This was all possible thanks for that foundation I laid.

    At the end of the day, everyone was satisfied, I was very satisfied, and I had finally completed Super Space Wars for the third time. Though, I cannot say that this will be its final stage.