Favored Freeware: Shoot Things

Shoot Things is an arcade-style side-scrolling space combat game, which parodies a few well-known retro games.

This is my entry for the iDevGames: 21 Days Later: Vectorized contest. It is a generic space shooter, parodying a few well-known retro games. Everything you see is drawn using only points and lines, via glAArg (the OpenGL AntiAliased Rendering Glue I’ve developed over the last few months.) Except for glAArg and some of the windowing front end, all of the code was written from scratch in 21 days. It should take you about 5 minutes to play the game, assuming you beat it on your first try. Which is unlikely.

Pros: Shoot Things functions well as a quick escape from reality, as long as don’t let yourself get frustrated by the adaptive difficulty. The combination of retro-style graphics with modern color usage makes for a rather pleasant visual presentation.

Cons: The AI is adaptive and increases in difficulty as you collect power-ups. This leads to the game being very difficult to beat.