A1. Executive Summary

Shooting Star is a challenging video game, where we utilize Sega Genesis controller to control a space shuttle that is moving horizontally across the bottom of the screen and shooting at the stars. The stars drop down in a random fashion, attempting to hit the space shuttle and killing one of its lives. If the space shuttle is hit by the stars, the player has to replay that level, which is similar to Super Mario game. The dropping speed of the stars increases as we go to a higher level, and there is an infinite number of levels with increasing star dropping speed. Shooting a moving star would generate more points compared to shooting a stationary star. The points are also parallel to the difficulty level of the game and the speed of the dropping star. Any dropping star that reaches the ground will result in point deduction; and if the point reduces to 0, a life is lost. Clearing each level provides some bonus points for the player, where the bonus will be in parallel to the difficulty levels. The game starts with 3 lives, and the player will gain a life, whenever he/she reaches every 1500 points. We also incorporate the technique of allowing the space shuttle to disappear from the right of the screen and reappear on the left of the screen, and vice versa, in order to make it more fun. We also prevent the player from holding down the shooting button, so the player would need to press the button multiple times in order to shoot repeatedly. Finally we incorporate different sound effects for shooting, being shot, clear a level, or lose the game. We also implement a high score table, which displays the top 5 scores and levels.

We chose to make a video game, because we came over to the ECE 476 lab during the previous semester, and played some of the games made by our friends last year. That inspired us to take this course and eventually make a game of our own. Since Lab 4, we have been very interested to get our game going, and hence we gradually came up with this idea of Shooting Star video game and built up our game gradually with more and more features. It is a very satisfying experience. Besides some hardware interfaces with Sega Genesis controller, our game is more on software complexity with a lot of C programming involved.