Alien Invasion

Alien Invasion is entirely written in C#, using DirectX 10 with SlimDX and a self-made rendering engine, asynchronous resource management, the FMOD audio engine and utilizes a component-based game architecture. We even have a little Lisp interpreter for our resource files! (yes, we are totally aware that this is absolute overkill for a small game like that. But this wasn’t about the game, it was about the learning experience and trying stuff we wanted to do. 😁)

The Game

Requirements

In order to run Alien Invasion, you need the following system requirements:

.NET Framework 4.6
SlimDX End User Runtime for .NET 4.0

Screenshots

Insights

History

Starting in summer 2010 (wow, was it really that long ago?) a couple of friends and me started developing a small game just for fun. We wanted to do it from scratch as a learning opportunity and to have complete freedom. Because it is recommended to start very small we chose to create a Space Invaders clone. You can never go wrong with the classics, can you? 😊 Since we did this in our free time casually aside from studying or working it took a little bit longer than it would usually take. The most parts were finished during the course of 2011, including the first graphical assets. In the following years, there were some pauses and times of slow progress alternated by times of high productivity.

Basically, the game was finished by the end of 2011. But as the rule of 80-20 (also called the Pareto principle) suggests, 80% of the time is consumed by the last 20% of the project. So during 2012 until the time of writing this (2015), most of the team was busy with life, but we still kept at it, polishing and refining the game until we were satisfied. Only a few graphical assets are missing (like proper laser graphics when shooting, a sprite for the mystery ship and a nice looking in-game HUD), but we decided its time to finish this one and move on to other projects.

Source Code

The source code can also be found on GitHub including the full commit history. Have fun with it!

The source code does not include the media folder called data from the binary zip archive. In order to run your custom build, copy the data folder from either the hardware or software binary zip into your builds' root folder.