Triangle Defender

This is my 2D Shooter game assignment for Michigan State University's CAS 117 Games and Interactivity class. It was rated one of the Top Three 2D Shooter assignments by the professor, and was shown at the Spring 2025 Student Showcase.

The class provided a number of C# scripts and Unity prefabs for a 2D shooter game, including game manager, player, enemy, projectile, health, and damage scripts. After completing the tutorial project to get a basic 2D shooter game working, I made a lot of modifications:

Designed a game where the player is a triangle fighting against squares in outer space, with three levels and a story intro cinematic that I narrated. It is inspired by 1980's games like Galaga and Space Invaders. The controls are left and right to move, and the spacebar to shoot.

Borrowing an idea from Asteroids, many squares split into two rectangles when shot. The Level 3 boss splits into 16 squares, which each split into two rectangles.

A square with a question mark flies by and gives you a 1up if you shoot it.

Modified the provided tutorial C# scripts and created new scripts to enable the enemies to split into multiple enemies, animate enemies from an initial position to their final position, make enemies firing at random times, disable enemies firing when player is dead, give the player a 1up, turn the subtitles on and off during the voiceover, made lives persistent across levels so it doesn't reset every level, and added a constant rotation to the spinning parent objects on level2.

Added GUI items to show how many lives you have left and what level you are on.

Created particle effects for player and enemy deaths, player projectile hits, and the stars in the backgrounds.

Created sound effects using Chiptone and Bfxr.

Added six royalty-free music tracks.

Used an 8-bit Atari font for all game text.

Added gamepad support.

Credits

------------------------------------------------

Unity starter project and tutorial, including

a number of assets and scripts:

Michigan State University - CAS 117

Game design, programming, writing, narration, trailer editing:

Bob Wilson

Sound effects created using Chiptone and Bfxr

Music for main menu, credits, levels 1-3, and the trailer:

PlayOnLoop

Music for story intro:

Peter Eastman

Atari 8-bit font:

Steve Boswell