Reese Jones

D.O.T.S. is a top-down space shooter Pikmen like game. Collect Dots from asteroids to follow your ship, and use them as ammunition to defeat your foes.

About

D.O.T.S. was made in one semester by a team of three. It was also the first game I worked on at DigiPen. Dots was inspired by games like Pikmen where the player has a bunch of little guys following them, but not only do they just follow the player, they are also the players tool to fight and defend themselves. D.O.T.S. was made using ProjectFUN, and in-house game editor developed at DigiPen. The editor provides things like simple physics and graphics, and even an interface to program state machines. Gameplay is programmed in C++.

 

Having fully developed A.I. helpers in such a short time proved to be difficult, so instead we went with a pseudo "boids" algorithm and then used forces to push them apart. The visual effect it created was a dynamic swarm of crystals, and we got very excited feedback on this. The next cool feature we developed was the different abilities of the player ship. The ship is a standard mining ship, and has no weapons or extra rocket boosters. The mining laser it carries is harmless against the shields of other ships. So we developed a few abilities that utilize the swarm of crystals behind the player ship. Each of the abilities draws on the reserves of crystals behind your ship.

 

Another interesting feature of this game was the boss. The player could actually find the boss at any point in the game, but unless the player had stocked up on crystals and found at least one of the power ups hidden throughout the world, it would be a difficult fight. The boss had two stages of combat, and performed several unique actions that the player had to counter or dodge.