Hivemind - Space Shmup

Fast-Paced Shoot-Em-Up, based off of Space Invaders!

Controls: Use Arrow Keys to move, hold X to shoot, press Z for powerup.

Credits: 

Space Invaders for inspiration. Lazy Devs Academy for code snippets, project walkthrough, and game code foundation. Undertale for bullet pattern inspiration. The original Pac-Man arcade machine art for inspiration on the page's cover art.

Behind The Scenes: 

As a school project, I was tasked with making a space-invaders type game by following a tutorial series made by Lazy Devs Academy and using a restricted game engine emulator called Pico-8.  I've had a lot of experience with Lua in the past with my own personal projects, so I assumed I would end up much further along than everyone else, as I have always been for past computer classes. Although, as it turned out, a lot of students in this class also had prior experience. I was only on-par, if not below average compared to the other kids in this class (some of these guys made some crazy progress early on). For the first few weeks, I fell behind, as I tried to stick to the tutorials. I didn't want to miss anything and get marked down for not meeting the requirements. Issue was, the teacher didn't base his curriculum around the slowest kid (thank God), and instead seemed to base his teaching around the average student in the class. Normally, I would have loved this, but it caused me some extra stress at the start of this project since I tried to follow the tutorial step-by-step to avoid a bad grade. 

After I reached the halfway point in the tutorial, I was ready to start putting bare minimum effort into the project. At that point, I was just tired of being behind and was ready to score a "decent" grade in exchange for not having to do homework. Instead of putting in the bare minimum, however, I decided to instead try to do things my way. I hated being restricted to this tutorial, as most of the things he taught were things that I already had a good concept of. My new strategy was to simply skim through each video and make things myself. This started with the explosions. I've dealt with custom particle systems in the past, so the first thing I did on my own was exactly that: making good explosions and particles. I think I did a good job with that. After this, everything about this project was my own. I had fun making the pink mini-boss and final boss, I had fun doing the pixel artwork without stressing time, I had fun doing the balancing. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed making this project, and I'm proud of how this 3-month school project came along. If there was one thing I had to take away from this project, it would be to not restrict yourself and simply have fun making games.