space-shooter.c

A cross-platform, top-down 2D space shooter written in C using only platform libraries.

Dependencies

• Base: Win32 (Windows), Xlib (Linux), Emscripten (Web)
• Rendering: OpenGL 3.3 (Windows/Linux), OpenGL ES 3.0 (Web)
• Audio: XAudio2 (Windows), ALSA/pthread (Linux), OpenAL (Web)
• Gamepad: XInput (Windows), evdev (Linux), Emscripten (Web)

Description

space-shooter.c is a cross-platform, top-down 2D space shooter written in standard C11 using only platform libraries (with platform libraries defined as anything included in the C standard library or supported platforms). space-shooter.c has been tested on Windows 10, Ubuntu Linux 16.04, Chrome 103 and Firefox 103. This project drew heavy inspiration from Handmade Hero and pacman.c.

The design and architecture of space-shooter.c is described here.

Caveat

I am not a professional game developer, nor a professional C programmer, so the design may be unconventional or sub-optimal in many ways. Happy to take feedback from any pros out there!

Building

Windows

• In a shell with cl set up, run build.bat for a debug build or build.bat release for an optimized build.
• Run space-shooter.exe from the build/ directory.

Linux

• Make sure development headers for the Linux kernel, Xlib, glx and ALSA are installed.
  • E.g. on Ubuntu, run the following: sudo apt install linux-libc-dev libx11-dev mesa-common-dev libasound2-dev
• Run make linux for a debug build or make linux-release for an optimized build.
• Run ./space-shooter from the build/ directory.

Web

• Make sure make and emscripten are installed.
• Run make web for a debug build or make web-release for an optimized build.
• Serve the build/ directory for debug builds or the site/ directory for release builds from a local web server (e.g. python -m SimpleHTTPServer), and open the page in Chrome or Firefox.

What About Mac?

I hope to work on a Mac platform layer as soon as I have a Mac machine to work on.

Contributing

Since this project is intended as a personal challenge, I am not accepting external contributions at this time. I am very open to feedback, however, so feel free to open an issue for anything that needs fixing.

Asset Credits

• Sprites: https://ansimuz.itch.io/spaceship-shooter-environment
• BG Music: https://chiphead64.itch.io/free-game-soundtrack-by-cactusdude-hurry-up
• SFX: https://fallenblood.itch.io/50-sfx
• Font: https://gpway.itch.io/white-pixel-sprite-font