Difference between revisions of "Spaceship Shenanigans"

Revision as of 09:14, 13 June 2008

Summary

This game resembles the arcade game Missile Command, and tests distribution and shifting of attention, and the effect of multimodal (auditory and visual) stimuli. The player defends a base at the center of the display, by shooting a weapons turret that sweeps clockwise (right arrow) or counter-clockwise (left arrow) along a circular defense perimeter.

Shooting:

Releasing the spacebar fires the turret laser. Pressing the spacebar will stop the ship and holding the spacebar down will charge up the laser to increase coverage area. No cooldown on the laser. The laser shoots to the edge of the screen.

Phase 1:

Enemy ships fly in from off screen and fly toward the base. Enemy ships might vary their path slightly and move at a constant speed. Enemy ships aim to crash into the perimeter to weaken it, increasing the base's vulnerability to attack and decreasing the player's energy resources.

Phase 2 (Distractor Session):

Friendly ships (distractors) fly in from off screen and orbit the base. Friendly ships randomly fire at enemy ships. Enemy ships randomly fire at friendly ships. When completing the game, the more friendly ships left alive, the more resources awarded. This is a positive incentive. Friendly ships appear at random intervals between 0 and 800 ms of each other. Reaction time within this paradigm measures the player's ability to distribute attention across a broad field in the presence or absence of distractors.

In 1/5 of all trials (this proportion may change), an enemy bomb materializes right at the defense perimeter armed with explosives. An early-warning system displays a large, 10 hz (50% duty cycle) flashing arrow at the center of the display, in the middle of the player's base. The arrow appears either 100 ms (one flash) or 800 ms (eight flashes) prior to the materialization of the enemy ship, and remains until the bomb materialises. The player then has until 800 ms after the bomb materializes before it arms itself and detonates. However, the early-warning system is fallible, and in some cases (20%), it indicates a sector 180º away from the bomb's actual sector. In addition, in half of the trials the arrow is accompanied by a klaxon (100 hz square wave modulated at 10 hz in synchrony with the arrow), and in the other half there is no klaxon. This aspect of the task combines a variation of a centrally cued Posner attention paradigm (testing effects of cue validity and cue-target onset asynchrony) (Posner et al. 1987) with a test of multi modal cueing advantage (visual only or visual and auditory).

Boss fight

Based on the basic five-box test from J. Townsend et al. - Brain Cognitive Research II. A Monster/Ship with 5 or 7 eyes is in the middle top half of screen. The player is at the bottom, and can move left and right to dodge lasers shot from the boss's antennas. One of the boss' eyes is slightly discolored in relation to the other eyes (attended location). Every (so often) one of the eyes opens (stimuli). The player can shoot by pressing the space bar, firing automatically to the currently opened eye. The player's objective is to shoot when the discolored eye opens (target stimuli),and when does so results in a hit. Shooting the other eyes (non-target stimuli) is simply ineffective.

Premise

The WSS White Giant is under attack! It is your job as Tactical Officer to guide the defense system to aid your fighters in shooting down incoming squadrons of enemy fighters and destroyers. Then jump in the hot seat of a C-24 fighter and travel with a fighter group to counterattack the enemy carrier launching the attacks on the White Giant.

Objective

Protect the WSS White Giant, destroy all enemy Wasp aircrafts, and defeat the Wasp commander.

Characters

Cheetah C-24 Fighter: See Meteor Madness

WSS White Giant: The colony that needs to be defended. It is armed with a Mobile Laser Defense Turret (MLDT) as its primary means of defense. It also gets support from the various C-24 fighters it carries.

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Wasp Fighters: Basic Wasp aircraft. They attack WSI ships in waves and kamikazi into the colony to take out its defenses.

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Demolition Wasp: A medium-sized Wasp aircraft. Warps in right next to the colony to directly attack it.

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Wasp Commander: Enemy commander who's impervious to almost all attacks. After the main Wasp force fails, directly assaults the colony.

Gameplay

This game is divided into 2 parts. The first part is the main portion of the game, the Colony Defense Portion. After that, the game moves to the Boss Battle potion. This may either complete a level or the game itself. The game may be either split into multiple levels of different difficulty or be a single level thats difficulty is determined by how well the player has done before in the past with the default, or starting, difficulty being relatively easy.

Colony Defense

The screen displays the WSS White Giant, the Colony, in the center of the screen, floating somewhere in space. This colony is armed with a mobile laser defense turret (MLDT) capable of firing charged lasers from the colony to the edge of the screen. The MLDT is either mounted onto a circular rail around the perimeter of the colony or just hovers around the edge of the colony. As game play progresses, various enemy alien aircrafts, Wasps, appear from off screen and dive at the colony in the center of the screen in an attempt to destroy it. Later on in the game, friendly ships, C-24 fighters, will appear from off screen as well, though less frequently. They will then begin to assist in the attack on the enemy alien aircrafts, which will fight back against the C-24s.

In addition to the basic Wasps, the OoO sends waves of demolition Wasps. These aircrafts are slow and take time to arm their attack so they are warped in directly next to the colony and then immediately begin to prep their attack. When this is about to happen, a warning signal is sent out by the colony letting the player know from what direction the demolition Wasp is appearing from, either above, below, left of, or right of the colony. However due to the complexity of predicting the warp in, the direction of the warning can be off as much as 25% of the time.

Boss Battle

After enough waves of Wasps have been destroyed, the Wasp commander appears above the colony and starts to attack it. The Wasp commander is a large floating head with several eyes (5 or 7), sharp pointy teeth, and antennas that the commander shoots lasers at the colony and MLDT from. The player must continue to use the MLDT in order to kill or at least drive away the Wasp commander while dodging the laser blasts it emits. In order for the player to actually be able to damage the commander, they must shoot at its weak point, one of its eyes. Only one of the eyes will be colored slightly different from the others which will let the player know that that is their target, all other eyes simply pose as distractors since a successful shot at one does nothing to the commander. Only one eye will be open at a time, and when the player fires the laser, it will automatically aim at the eye that is open. In the case of no eye being open, the MLDT simply fires at the impervious exoskeletal armor of the commander, essentially doing nothing.

Scoring

Cash is awarded for each Wasp destroyed in any phase. A special cash bonus is awarded for defeating the Wasp commander at the end of the level.