Dear readers,

I am happy to announce today the release of a new game I worked on: Soviet VS Asteroids. The game was developed during the last jam of the Game Dev Party (see the introduction of that 4th jam [fr] or a report of the 2nd edition [en]). The concept is simple: during an entire weekend, 50 people gather, make teams and work on a game, with the goal of having something to show (and to play) in the end.


Greetings, comrade cosmonaut!

This time I decided to work with my friend Aurélien Defossez, who proposed a "planet defense" gameplay. The idea is that you are in space, and asteroids are flying at you. You will need to use your weapons to destroy those nasty asteroids and survive as long as possible. Aurélien gathered a team of 6: he was managing the project and programming, along with Louis-Rémi Babé, Maxime Viry and myself. Mathieu Perez created all the sounds and musics of the game, and did a bit of code as well. Frédéric Ostéréro drew all the beautiful graphics. With this fine team and a lot of work, we demonstrated something pretty good on Sunday evening. But it was not ready for release yet. Over the last 2 weeks, we did some bug fixing, added the missing menus (things like credits or tutorial that do not matter for the demo but are needed when you release the game to the public), and polished the gameplay, mainly by adjusting the difficulty so as many people as possible can enjoy it.

And now, it is time: we believe the game is ready to be played! At this point I hope you are excited and want to download the game as soon as possible. You can do just that by clicking one of those links:

You can play the game with your mouse and keyboard, or with a pad. Make sure your pad is plugged in before you start the game or it will not be detected. You have 2 weapons at your disposal: a rocket launcher and a laser command. You aim at asteroids with the joysticks or your mouse and the Q, A or D keys of your keyboard. If you play with a keyboard, the lasers will fire automatically, and you can shoot rockets by clicking your mouse or hitting the space key. With a pad, you shoot with LS and RS. By pressing the Tab or Enter keys, or the Y button on a pad, you enter the upgrade menu: use your money to make your weapons better, or clear the space around you if you are overrun, or place new lasers or drones around you to improve your defense.

We all hope you are going to enjoy our game! Do not hesitate to make any comments here or to share your high scores! We would love to hear from you.

If you are interested by the technical details, there you go: the game in programmed in lua, using the LÖVE framework (also known as love2d). You can find the source code on github: feel free to fork and open pull requests or issues if you find bugs. Quick feedback on lua: it's nice, but some choices in the design of the language are weird. I definitely prefer Python, but wouldn't mind working with lua again. LÖVE on the other hand was quite a pain to work with, for 2 majors reasons: missing features (no sprite system in a 2d game framework? ) and documentation. As usual, the documentation of a tool is critical and even if the API was well documented, there was almost no tutorial, and no examples of basic features or code.

Play & Enjoy!