nexus shot 1
nexus shot 2
an alien got exploded
more aliens getting killed
a view of the stage 1
high score overview screen
waiting screen before the game starts
hall of fame

Invaders

Using MATLAB, we built out a game that looks fun and sounds cool!

Our main motivation is to make a somewhat polished game during the span of HackHarvard 2024 and also to have fun!

How MATLAB helped us

While playing or watching the game, you may notice that the aliens have different strategic movements depending on how far into the stage you are, and also depending on how aggressive you are within the game (whether you you the type of person who likes to combo up a bunch of aliens and shoot them all at once, or you are the type of person who is just throwing ammos everywhere without care!) Because of this, the simulation logic of the aliens is very complicated, and with MATLAB, we are able to generate the curves for the aliens path as well as their attacking behaviours. This makes for a tremendously more organic random-generated game. We are quite happy with how the aliens behave. If you want to see it for yourself, I encourage you to play it!

What we did

As of the time of writing this, we are proud to share that during this hackathon, we have successfully:

Looted quite a lot of t-shirts.
Ate all the free meals (although we are still bummed about no ramens as advertised like that on the calendar!)
Solved some crossword puzzles!
Made a working and quasi-playable game!!!!!!!!!

On the technical level, we:

Interfaced with the native sound libraries for audio playback (example being PulseAudio for Linux!)
Interfaced with FreeType for font rendering that supports UTF-8 and hopefully some Arabic.
Created a custom immediate-mode UI library.
Used OpenGL for the graphics backend.
Made hot-reloading works for assets change, which is extremely useful during development.

As for the game, some of its features include:

Particles system.
Automatic saving and loading high scores to leader board.
Procedurally generated aliens behaviour and attack strategies.
Level transitions.
Different power ups for the player (V shooting, double/triple shots, shields, piercing shots, ...)

Plans

The game is quite good looking already, but we want to add some more features to it after the hackathon, which may not just be limited to:

Bonus rounds where you can bounce the aliens around like in Gaplus.
A mind-control vacuum pick up where it allows you to necro aliens into shooting with you.
A one-up type of thing where you can get an extra health up by shooting somethiing funny.
Boss fights, mini-boss fights.
Port this to other platforms like Android, Raspberry PI, or iOS.

Right now, the environment we used to build the game is Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Windows is supported but is un-tested.

Thank you everyone at HackHarvard this year for sharing positive energy all around!