Red Baron

RED BARON

=== Information ===

Red baron is a 2D side-scrolling shoot-em-up game themed around the First World War. In the game, player controls a fighter which mission is to sabotage enemy’s transports, bomb ground target, and destroy enemy’s fighters.

=== Controls ===

[A] [D] to steer the plane up and down.

[Enter] to fire out of the front, ["] or ['] to drop bomb from the back (It's one key next to Enter) .

Holds [Enter] to stops engine/brakes midair, releases it to resume flying.

[Esc] to toggle pause/unpause.

=== Project Reflection ===

This project was made for the final assignment of 2nd semester of 1st Year in Computer Games Design and Programming in BUV. This was by far my favourite project out of all the 1st year projects.

I felt like making SHMUP was a very formulaic and boring, so I added mechanics that doesn't normally exist in such a genre. I added: Gravity, Plane Steering in XY axis, Bombing, even an Objective System, etc.

This, I felt added extra challenges to the gameplay and helped it stands out from the crowd. And it felt right to theme it WWI, and name it after the king of dogfights himself, the Red Baron.

My favourite aspect of the game was the Enemy AI. 

There are a variety of Enemy Plane, some smarter than others. At the very basic, every planes just flies forward, and occasionally shoots, but with stronger opponents, they can actually chase the player and fires at them, either from the front or back.

The AI here makes dogfights feels intuitive, challenging, and fun.

There are a still a few things that I should have done to improve this prototype tremendously:

- Use Object-Pooling to reduce lag spikes.

- Redo some of the code base to better utilizes OOP.

- Make and Add Audio to the project, which I was hesitant to do for these prototypes and I had a lot of time constraits.

Overall, still my favourite project by far.

=== Asset Credits ===

• Bomber Run 3^rd version by RyanStevensonMakesArt
  • (Link to asset)
    
  • Note: They seems to have changed their name to Pixelated Studioz by 2023, and the asset is also gone too. It was a really niche type of asset which I was thankful for, since it helped the theme so much.
• Destroyed City Parallax by Maelstrion
  • (Link to creator as asset taken off their page)
    
  • Note: Maelstrion seems to have completely disappeared after I finished this project, their profile is blacked out too. So if you are out there, Maelstrion, thank you. I'm grateful towards you and I hopes you are doing ok.
• Explosion animations pack by Ansimuz
  • (Link to asset)
• Free Simple Pastel Background by Edermunizz
  • (Link to Asset)
• Press Start 2P font by Codeman38
  • (Link to asset)