Survive endless waves of asteroids and enemy ships as you fly through the cosmos in this upgraded version of the Unity tutorial project of the same name. Sawyer's Space Shooter offers a challenging experience for dedicated players, featuring two powerful bosses and a wide variety of unique powerups.

Players can move their ship around most of the screen using either WASD or the ARROW keys, and can shoot incoming asteroids and enemies with the SPACE bar. Each asteroid is worth 10 points, each enemy ship is worth 25 points, and each boss ship is worth 250 points. The player may also toggle auto-fire with the J key. The game gets faster as it progresses.

The player can also pick up various powerups by flying through them, although they can be shot and destroyed by both enemy ships and the player. Each powerup has a different color and pattern. Most powerups are temporary.
- Twin Fire (brown): shoots two lasers instead of one.
- Rapid Fire (white w/ lines): increases the player's rate of fire.
- Triple Shot (???): gives the player three lasers that spread outwards.
- Double Points (purple): increases the player's score multiplier by one.
- Slow Motion (light blue): slows all asteroids, enemy ships, and enemy lasers.
- Shield (dark blue): protects the player from one hit.
- Power Bolts (yellow): increases the size and damage of the player's laser.
- Hit and Split (white): every asteroid and enemy hit explodes into new lasers that can hit more objects.
- Grenade (white): blows up all asteroids and non-boss enemies onscreeen. Activated with the I key.
- Bubble Stream (white): replaces the player's weapon with a stream of purple bubbles that can push away incoming objects.
- Life (brown): gives the player an extra chance after dying.
- Black Hole (brown): the player can shoot black holes that pull in all enemies and asteroids.
- Homing Lasers (yellow): each laser homes in on the closest enemy.
- Minion Spawner (brown): the player can shoot smaller ships that then shoot at asteroids and enemies.
- Shotgun (white): the player's laser splits as it goes down the screen.

There are also two boss enemies that can appear at any point in the game. Both bosses have the same health and give the same point bonus, and stay at the top of the screen. The purple boss enemy spawns more enemy ships to attack the player. The red boss enemy shoots a laser that splits repeatedly until it creates a deadly wave of lasers.

The player can be killed by running into asteroids, enemy ships, or enemy laser fire. Once the player dies, the player may press R to restart.

Sawyer's Space Shooter was developed mostly over the summer in about a month, as preparation for his upcoming mobile game Imperium. The game was mostly based on the basic Unity tutorial series of the same name, but was heavily modified at Nathan's request to test the limits of Sawyer's capabilities with the Unity engine. In many ways, the game was developed as a rival to Nathan's unreleased version of Space Shooter, which itself was modified with some similar concepts (mostly with powerups and the boss enemy).

• All of the art assets used in the game, including the textures for the powerup cubes, were recycled from existing assets in the original project. For example, the shield cube uses the same texture as the background.
• The powerup breaking sound effect was actually a recording of Sawyer popping a balloon in an "echoey" hallway.
• A large portion of the game was coded while Sawyer was on vacation. He never really got used to the time zone there...
• In its initial release, the F key was used to shoot, the SPACE bar was used for grenades, and the A key was used to toggle auto-fire. Sawyer quickly realized his mistakes and corrected the controls shortly after the first release.
• Space Shooter is Sawyer's first game to appear on the website, and his second game in Unity. However, Sawyer has made numerous games outside of Unity, including his iPhone puzzle game Iris and several small projects on KhanAcademy.
• The 'Minion' powerup was the last one created for the game.
• The player can also click to shoot, but this is much more difficult.
• The splitting laser (from the enemy boss) apparently faced a bug where lasers would escape the game area and continue duplicating off-screen. In order to fix this, the lasers only duplicate up to five times.
• To keep Nathan updated, Sawyer would frequently send short clips of the game with any new powerups. For some reason, however, he would often film the screen with his phone.
• Sawyer's Space Shooter is so far the only new game from 2017.
• Sawyer argues that the 'Bubble Stream' is more of an anti-gravity weapon (which makes literally no sense).
• The 'Double Points' powerup doesn't actually double your points.
• The 'Shotgun' powerup clearly behaves nothing like an actual shotgun.
• The player can only have up to 5 minions at a time.
• The 'Slow Motion' powerup does not affect enemies that are already on the screen.
• The 'Hit and Split' powerup used to kill the boss in one hit, as the explosion of lasers would continue doing damage until the boss was dead. Additionally, this would cause so much lag the game would crash.
• Sawyer once joked that he would replace the background image with a picture of his fish.

Date

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Date

• Change

Creator: Sawyer Dobson

Format: Unity WebGL (New)

Dimensions: 450x675

Completion: Full Game