Space Fortress
CLIENT: Florida State University College of Psychology
DEPLOYMENT: October 28, 2020
PLATFORM: FSU Lab PC
PROGRAMS: Visual Studio 2019, Monogame
OBJECTIVE: Have a working exact copy of the game used for video game psychology in such a way that it does not change past or ongoing test results from the old version
CONCEPT: Recreate old research game “Space Fortress” from the ground up on a modern engine for Florida State University’s College of Psychology
See the Game in Action
synopsis
The player controls a ship that can fly around a stationary fortress. The ship can fire missiles, and the fortress will also fire at the ship periodically. Homing mines occasionally appear to attack the ship, and bonus symbols cycle through different characters that the player must react to in order to obtain bonus points. Score is kept track in four parts,
Points, Control, Velocity, and Speed. Points are gained by dealing damage, and lost by taking damage. Control is gained by staying within the outer ring of the arena. Velocity goes up if you keep within a certain speed limit. And speed is gained based on how quickly the player can deal with the mines.
Read About Space Fortress Here:
Snapshots
Our Process
The original game’s source code was very outdated and difficult to work with, which is why we were asked to reprogram it. It was written in Java, and utilized several different libraries from many different sources, each with multiple languages supported and included in the source code. This is very inefficient and messy, and it was difficult to parse through in order to verify how the original code worked. The amount of external libraries used in the remake is minimal, as the game itself is very simple and needs very little advanced code.
The engine chosen for recreating the original was “Monogame”, an open-source still supported version of Microsoft’s old XNA engine. It was chosen to most accurately be able to play and act the exact same as the original arcade-like 2D shoot-em-up.
The language chosen to write the software was C#, as the engine is also in C#. Monogame is intuitive to program and works well with any Windows integrations that were needed. The program also utilizes Windows forms and reads and writes to text documents to be able to control factors of the game, and to collect the data used for research.
The game was created to meet the standards of the Psychology department, and after vigorous testing, it was determined to match the original exactly, down to the same results from test players.
PROJECT TEAM:
Calvin Labbe [Lead Programmer]
Lucas von Hollen [Director]