3D Galaga

This game is live, you can play it here (GPU usage is recommended)

Final project for Dr. Stephen Guy’s class Animation and Planning in Games. My classmate Rafi Barash and I collaborated on this project.

Our directive was to create a game that made uses of what we have learned during the semester. We chose to create Galaga because we can create our custom Physics Engine and Path Finding.

Media

Gameplay

Presentation Video

Physics Engine

Rafi made the most of this Physics Engine, and it is a published npm package. The package can be found here.

The physics engine supports abstract classes for detecting and handling collisions between objects and updating them with Eulerian Integration. It also supports an extensible particle system engine, which we used for our Star Tunnel, our Laser, and our Explosion particle systems. The physics engine was heavily inspired by this youtube tutorial, and the particle system engine was heavily inspired by this open-source implementation

Movements

Player

The player is controlled using the keyboard, and the player target point also rotates along with the mouse movement. Each bullet fires from the player or the enemy is a particle and it is controlled by our Physics Engine.

To avoid the player stops and starts too abrubtly, we also decided to instead of setting its velocity directly to zero when the user releases the key, we decay the velocity by a factor of 10. That way we achieved a much smoother movement.

Enemy

The enemies spawn in packs of 5, and they try to randomly path find to the player to destroy the player’s ship. They player has 100 points of health and it decreases by 20 each bullet received. Each frame, there is 1% that an ememy will path find to a player (mostly to dodge the player’s bullets).

Drawbacks

The biggest disadvantage to our approach is since we are loading a lot of 3D models into our game, it takes a bit of time to load and to remove all the meshes from the website, therefore there are a lot of lags during the transition between each stage of the game. We hope to resolve this issue in the future.

We also wanted to load custom fonts, because the fonts from THREE doesn’t fit the theme of our game. But the load function of THREE was a bit buggy and we did not get it to work to load our own font.

Future Work

In the future, we would like to add more features into the game, clean up the code and optimize for slower computers. Right now when I test the game on my computer with a GPU, it runs very smoothly, but on my old computer, there are a lot of lags. The features I would like to add are smarter path finding algorithms, more artistic looking movement for the enemies, a level system, and item system that player can collect on the way.

Source Code

We chose to implement our game in THREE.js, the full source code is available here