A remake of the classic 1982 Imagic game Cosmic Ark.
The game alternates between the two gameplay phases described below. During either phase, closing the application will suspend the game. Launching the game after this will automatically resume from the suspend point.
In this phase, the player controls a flying pod. The goal is to collect each beastie on the screen and deposit them in the mothership. Doing so awards the player points, with a greater number of points awarded if a matching pair are delivered together. Delivering a pair will also refill the fuel stores of the mothership.
Gathering beasties is done by deploying a tractor beam from the pod. The first beastie touched by the beam will be pulled into the pod. To deposit the collected beasties, simply fly the pod over the mothership. Once all the beasties are collected, the next phase will begin.
After a certain amount of time passes, an asteroid will head for a collision course with the mothership. When the asteroid begins to draw near, the red lights on the mothership will begin to blink. When that happens, return the pod by flying over the mothership and use the mothership to shoot down the asteroid.
This phase is quite simple. The player controls the mothership and must shoot down all approaching asteroids. Each asteroid destroyed awards points, with red asteroids being worth more. Like in the pod phase, when hit by an asteroid the mothership loses fuel. The fuel indicator is the red line in the middle of the mothership. If the fuel runs out, the mothership is destroyed. Firing a shot also reduces fuel.
Mothership: Use the mouse to point in a direction and press the left mouse button to fire in that direction.
Pod: Use the WASD keys to move the pod in a given direction. Use the left mouse button to deploy the tractor beam.
This projects was started as a way for the developer to gain experience in both using the C programming language and in making a complete (however simple) video game. It's a bit rough around the edges and only works on Linux (specifically X11-based distros). At this time there are no plans to improved the game or add features.
This is shared with the hopes that someone looking over the code will find it interesting or useful. Comments in source code are few and far between, but function and variable names were selected to be descriptive enough to (hopefully) make the intention fairly clear.
Code, art, and design by tspike2k. Based on Cosmic Ark by Imagic.
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Source code is licensed under the Boost Software License 1.0. Assets are licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 license