Super Galaxy Joust

A piece of interactive video entertainment created in 48 hours for /r/gamemakerstudio's 2016 jam, gm(48), whose theme was "space." At the time, I was an avid fan of Frontier Elite 2, whose Newtonian-mechanics basis resulted in space battles that closely resembled jousting. Adapting this action for a 2D plane led to a game that is in essence Spacewar! I think it's pretty darn cool.

I thought at the time that I knew enough math to replicate the look of the vehicles Vlambeer's Luftrausers. In truth, I did not know math well enough to reverse engineer their visuals. I did know the general idea behind the rotations that Vlambeer had used, and after a solid hour of iteration, I managed to stumbled onto the right arrangement of sines and cosines which resulted in such a look. It's pretty darn convincing.

Hey, that reminds me: like two years after finishing this game, I was thinking about making another space-based game with this one's visual style and two-dimensional configuration. I hoped to have planetary interactions feature prominently, but I was having trouble drawing sufficiently large shapes to represent planets. There, I think I managed to math out an even better silhouette-spaceship system than is present in Super Galaxy Joust. Like, I managed to get a decorative stripe and cockpit to properly follow the rotation of a two-dimensional ship. It looked awesome. If I can get the source off of the laptop it's currently residing on, I'll post a .gif here showing it.

This is also the only game I've made that has proper artificial intelligence.  It's not complex by any means, but since the game is so simple to begin with it can get away with executing any of three potential actions -- boosting, shooting, and / or turning -- when certain conditions are met. It's functional, it's pretty lenient to the player in how it tracks its shots, and it doesn't do any crazy, totally unpredictable movements; so, it's fun to play against, and I'm satisfied with it.