My Sun is a Sea of Stars (Indie 2D Mob-Shooter)
What is My Sun is a Sea of Stars?
A comedic mob-shooter where you play as “Sunny D”, a belligerent punk sun flying through space to pick a fight with other space objects such as black holes, quasars, and “space junk” for cramping his style. Join Sunny D to shout some rather creative expletives as he shoots his way through rival space-fairers in My Sun is a Sea of Stars.
Development:
This game was created as a solo project given to me in ICS-485 at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa (Video Game Design and Development Class) for Spring 2024. Creative freedoms were given to me to make anything, with the only caveat being that all audio must come from my voice or body. Because of this detail, I decided to make a game that would be comedic to fit the rather unprofesional audio recording. The end result was a success. Making the audio bad on purpose was something that added to the comedic effect of the game. I was able to work with more professional audio-design choices in a future project in the class.
My initial idea was to make a classic space-ship shooter, but felt my motivation lacking due to its lack of creativity. For whatever reason, I had the inspiration to come up with a mix of a space-shooter and something indicative of Vampire Survivors. Because of this, I delved into AI programming and was able to drum up a scheme using C# whereby the enemies seek out the player character. In addition to this, I developed an enemy spawn system to go along with the AI moving towards the player. I didn’t use visual programming, so I just relied on learning C# to see the project through.
The game is currently unfinished as there was a tight deadline for the class, but I plan to come back to the project someday and fill it with more enemy assets and power-ups.
Screenshot:
Source: Github Repository