Asteroids

I made a game!

Maybe re-made is a better description. I coded my own multithreaded version of Asteroids, the classic arcade game. Following the link takes you to the GitHub repo of the game.

The player defends against oncoming asteroids as it navigates a star field in the Starship Enterprise. New asteroids are spawned at random times on a background thread. Also each asteroid manages a thread that detects collisions with the player and any phaser blasts shot by the player. I used the SDL library to detect user input and render images and text (like the score) to the screen.

The game is actually my C++ Nanodegree capstone project. While not a C++ novice, taking the course brought me up speed on the recent standard – C++17 when I took the course. Some of the major topics covered: RAII, OOP, smart pointers, templates, interfaces, and the concurrency API. Each chapter of the course culminated in a project, and I describe them here.

While developing the game, I had trouble figuring out when to stop and just submit the project, because I have so many ideas for new features. Like a menu system, an animation system, a thread pool, a moving background …