Due to an unexpected and exciting collaborative art project I am working on, Game-A-Week is being put on hold for the next month. The next game will be announced on July 1st, and will continue through July 30th.

Here are the results of my adventures of the past week. Although I did get a lot of help from Google, I opted to script everything from scratch, so this is almost entirely original code.  The art design is also original.  Star photographs courtesy of NASA and some of my textures were derived from source photos found on cgtextures (great site for getting material to make custom textures with).  Done in the free Indie version of Unity 3D 3.5.2.

Although I did not quite get this as far along as I wanted, I still learned a lot from this project. Here’s what’s left to do:

Play the game in your browser below (requires Unity webplayer).
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“In Soviet Russia, Asteroids are you!”

To kick off my Game-A-Week experiment I decided to do something really simple, both conceptually and technically.  The idea behind Soviet Asteroids is a roll-reversel.  I’ve taken the classic game of Asteroids and given the player the task of destroying that pesky star ship ruining their pristine asteroid field.

The game will ideally be played on a touch-device, such as an iPad or Android smart phone, however the version for Game A Week will be available only on the computer.

The gameplay will feature:

• Drag-to-shoot asteroids onto the screen, hopefully hitting the space ship.
• Every 10 or so hits gives you the “Activate Mothership” option
• Realistic collision physics for the Asteroids
• Some other surprises!

My goal with this project is to experiment with player perspectives and to introduce myself to concepts in touch control programming, AI programming, and collision physics.

Below is a mockup of what the game will look like.

Starting on June 1st, I will be conducting a little project/experiment. I got this idea from my brother, who I would link to but his blog is apparently under revamping at the moment.

It’s called Game A Week, and here’s how I’m going to do it. Each Saturday, I will post the concept for (and begin work on) a simple, short, and sweet game. The following Friday, I will release said game to this blog for all to play.

Now, keep in mind 4 days isn’t a lot of time.  My goal isn’t to create fantastic games that will blow away the latest blockbuster from the major studios, but rather to experiment with concepts in gaming and to expand my skill set in regards to game development (namely 3D animation and programming).  As such, the games, while simple, will be highly experimental—and probably really weird!  To put it another way, the idea here isn’t quality but rather rapid-fire-brain-storming-and-wire-framing (to borrow a term from design).  It’ll be fun, for everyone. Maybe.

Stay tuned—the first concept is just around the corner!