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Cosmic Assault

The Future is Retrogaming

The Russians were the bad guys. Don Johnson was cool. We listened to Rush, Duran Duran, and Grandmaster Flash on our Sony Walkmans. There was a new cable station called MTV that played nothing but music videos. We were actually suprised to find out Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker's father. And we knew what the definitions of "is" and "mission accomplished" were.

And by God, we knew what video games were for. Mowing down waves of unending mutant invaders from another galaxy, in a desperate but ultimately futile attempt to... well, the plot lines back then were a little sketchy, but it didn't stop us from sticking billions of quarters into oddly painted cabinets in dim, smoky arcades.

I wrote Cosmic Assault as my little homage to my coming of age in the early 1980s. It started life as one of the tutorials supplied for teaching programmers the fundamentals of pygame and I used that tutorial to hack together a little shoot-em-up game to see how all the components worked together.

One thing led to another, and the program was built on many layers of "Wouldn't it be neat if...", "I wonder what this does..." or "How do I do this..." As a result, this game is no paean to modern software engineering practices. Even though it uses classes, inheritance, and aggregation, the OO misfeatures are so numerous that it is guaranteed to make enterprise Java developers openly weep in their Gang of Four books.

But, in spite of all that (or likely because of it), this game is addictive, mindless fun. Your job is to fly your spacecraft into the unknown and mow down hordes of ruthless enemies in a noble effort to... Oh hell, quit listening to me babble, look at the screenshots, and download and play this bad boy already.

Version 1.1 includes a couple bug fixes, and a little bit of a lead-in to the first level, so you're not tossed right into the thick of things.

There will be a version 1.2 in the not too distant future which will include a central leader board hosted here at A Minor Games, so you can see how you stack up against other players worldwide. I'm still working on the network hacks and user interface to make that happen, though.

Screenshots

The Front Splash Screen

If only the rest of the game were that easy.

I think I'm in a little trouble.

It could never last, could it?

Requirements

You need either a Windows 2000 or XP computer with a video card and monitor capable of 1280x1024 in true color mode. Alternatively, you can run the source distribution on a Linux or Mac OS system with Python and pygame installed, as long as it can handle the same video resolution. A version that falls back to 1024x768 is forthcoming... It's done, but I haven't had the time to package it yet.

The author's development machine is a PC with an AMD Sempron 3000+, 1 gigabyte of memory, an nVIDIA 5500FX video card with 128MB memory, running Fedora Core 4, Python 2.4.1 with Pygame 1.7.1 and libSDL 1.2.8. The game runs fine on this system without breaking a sweat at 60 fps.

Downloads

  • Source tarball - suitable for Unix geeks like me who already have python with pygame installed, or if you just want to laugh at my hideously pastafied code. I really can write much cleaner code than this.
  • Windows Executable - download this zip file, unpack it someplace, and run the uber-nifty cosmic_assault.exe program in it. Note: I have only tested this on Windows XP under VMWare workstation. It is (barely) playable but the sound is crappy. I am hoping that the performance problems are all because of VMWare. It runs great under Linux on my system, which is an Athlon XP 2000+ with 1G of RAM and and NVidia GeForce 5500, hardly a cutting edge system.
  • Mac OS X Executable - Not just yet. Until some kind soul donates Tiger to me, or if I can okay it with my boss to try it on my work computer in my off-hours, it's not happening anytime soon, either.

License

This code is released under the GPL, v2. The music is copyrighted by their respective authors, and I have tried for months to find the people who did these songs and ask permission to use them. If you are the copyright holder of one of these songs, I would appreciate it if I could get the permission from you. If, however, you don't wish me to include it in my game, please let me know, and I will promptly remove them. The so-called "art" I release into the public domain. The font I use is "Colony Wars" and is © 2000 Neale Davidson, who has stated that it is free to be included in non-commercial projects.