Crossfire

Introduction

My goal was to create a game similar to Crossfire, a bullett-dodging shooting-less shooter for windows. The original game was featured in The Best Games from GMTK Game Jam 2018.

How to play

This is a bullet-dodging game. You control your character via the mouse, hopefully in a way to avoid being shot by the enemies. The enemies spawn randomly, and try to shoot you. You can not shoot back, instead you should try letting them shoot each other. When an enemy dies, you can get some points by collecting the orbs it left. Be quick, as the do despawn. Sometimes you get some powerups, such as shield (bullets bounce back), ghost(bullets pass trough you) or buster(you get faster, smaller and you can punch trought enemies) (not implemented yet). After some points, a few bigger enemies will spawn that shoot exploding bullets, which may kill more than one enemies... When you die, you spawn a shockwave that kills everything. When you run out of your lives (3), it is game over (not implemented yet). Press the mouse to enter slow-mo mode, where the game slows down by 5 You can pause the game any time by pressing ESC

Keyboard shortcuts in debug mode

• D to toggle debug draw
• RETURN to freeze game
• S to step 0.1s, SPACE to step 0.001s (only while frozen)
• W to spawn a shockwave
• Press 1 to spawn an enemy at the cursor
• Press 2 to spawn a big enemy at the cursor
• Press x to delete entity under cursor
• Press q to instantly end the game

Why so much code & complexity?

My secondary goal was to let this project be kind of enterprise-ready

• I had some unit tests
• I plan to make good documentation Lua's documentation tools can not really help here, and writing the whole thing by hand would be tedious, so I'll have to learn that skill in a future project.
• Refactored, re-implemented most of it many-many times
• Went trough multiple OOP -> Functional -> OOP paradigm shifts
• I track all of the work through github, using issues heavily

So overall I created a few (hopefully) real-life-like issues for myself to deal with, just so I can try dealing with them. This was partly unintentional... If my productivity suffered in the process, that only means I learnt a few things.

Final tally:

• project: 2875 LOC in 64 files
• build system: 176 LOC in 10 files
• 4 MB .love bundle (8.2 MB win64 bundle)
• took around a year to make in my spare time (while multiplexing between a couple of other projects I'll finish "one day")

So is this game playable & fun?

I did my best to make it so. I'm not a game designer, and I'd make a terrible one, but I am proud of myself for this.

Technical overview

• LÖVE2D engine
• Nata ECS-lib
• flux tweening lib
• my own GUI lib

If you'd want to try it out...

I do not underestand why would you want, but sure You only need Löve2D, version 11.3 to run this, and a precompiled bundle from the releases page

To make that bundle yourself

You need:

• Lua 5.3
• luarocks
• a linux system
• libzip Steps:
• clone this repo with --recurse-submodules and cd into it
• run lua build.lua install-dev This'll install love-release and also luacheck
• run lua build.lua package
• your files are in the releases directory

To simply play the game:

• lua build.lua launch

To check for linting erros:

• lua build.lua lint

To clean up your mess:

• lua build.lua clean

Used assets

(I got all sounds from orangefreesounds.com, for most of them I used Audacity to edit and convert)

• David Chung's DigitFont
• supercomputer font by Disaster Fonts
• pickup sound
• shooting sound
• explosion sound
• powerup sound
• extra life sound
• death sound
• bullet hit and menu
• powerup reverse
• enemy spawning noises
• menu music
• game music
• highscores music

Thanks to

• the LÖVE2D team for this engine
• Tesselode for Nata
• RXI for flux
• for the makers of the assets I used