Taking inspiration from games like Missile Command, Ikaruga, and Tempest, Spaceship Spectacular is a “radial shooter” where a lone hero must defend earth’s landmarks and major cities against swarms of invaders with his spectacular spaceship - while racking up a high score, of course.
Our goal for this project was to create a fast-paced shooter with an impressive arcade visual flair. We also wanted the game to contain unique gameplay (such as the outward radial movement) while also mixing and matching the successful elements of various other classic arcade shooters.
Unfortunately, Spaceship Spectacular was developed in Flash, which is kind of on its way out, as of this writing. I used to have the game embedded here in the browser, but that doesn’t really work anymore.
You can download the swf file here, if you have a flash player locally.
Development
This game was created for the Intermediate Game Programming class at USC using Actionscript 3 and the Flex Framework.
The game was designed and programmed by myself and Andrew Ogden. I also created a lot of temporary art that we decided would be good enough to also be the final art, for the purposes of a student game!
The musical cues and sound effects were created by Michael Engesser and Daniel Perry of the Berklee College of Music.