Console Invaders

Description

A quickly thrown together concept of a console-based game, heavily inspired by the classic arcade game Space Invaders.

This is the result of a solo "game jam"-esque challenge I set myself, to see how far I could get in a day (roughly eight hours from start to finish). The aim was to make a simple but functional console-based game in roughly the equivalent of a working day.

Requirements:

• Windows 10 Insiders Build #14931 or newer, in order to support 24-bit colors in the console (developed on Windows 11 version 21H2).
• Windows Terminal (this project was developed for, and "balanced" around, a console window with dimensions of 156x42, developed for Windows Terminal version 1.11.2921.0).
• .NET 6 runtime and SDK.

Gameplay:

• Use the left and right arrow keys to move to the sides.
• Use the up arrow key to shoot.
• Hide behind barriers (they can withstand four hits before breaking).
• If the invaders make it to the horizontal green line, you lose.
• If you die (take three hits), you lose.
• If you manage to shoot all the invaders before they reach the green line, you win.

Features

• Efficient console text writing, using P/Invoke to leverage kernel32.dll's WriteConsole function.
• Full 24-bit color support, utilizing ANSI escape sequences.
• Very basic animations. Used when an invader is shot.

Known issues

Due to the brief nature of this project, the quality standard to be met were simply to run adequetly on the machine it was developed on. This meant intentionally letting certain known issues remain in the code, as they did not dramatically decrease the performance or experience on the development machine.

• The codebase is messy, and lacks documentation.
• The Game class has way too many responsibilities.
• Improper string usage, resulting in aggressive garbage collection.
• Poor performance when using ConHost on older systems.
• Suboptimal usage of thread safe code.
• The ConsoleChar union struct has two unused bytes, specifically the last byte in the foreground and background fields.
• Resizing or zooming the console window breaks rendering, as the game's grid does not adjust after startup.
• Support for ConHost (the old Windows console host) was an afterthought. Some of the characters used as sprites do not render properly in ConHost, and performance can be rather poor on older hardware.
• Only runs on Windows.

License

MIT license.