Description

Star Republic is an on-rails space adventure shooter whose game mechanics were inspired by the likes of the Nintendo 64 classic, Starfox 64, and various arcade-shooters such as Raiden. Like these games, there is a variety of enemies that the player must defend itself against, each with its own unique AI. In order to combat these enemies, the player has a number of different weapons as part of his or her arsenal.

The base weapon is a blaster that shoots directly down the aiming reticle; this aiming reticle auto-locking capability is designed to allow the player the freedom to dodge incoming bullets whilst still maintaining an assault on the enemies. This weapon does smaller amounts of damage per shot, but is relatively accurate and able to fire in rapid succession.

The ships secondary weapon is a shotgun, which, when fired, sends a wide spread of bullets in the general vicinity of the aiming reticle. In general, this is useful to do damage to a large number of targets in front of you; however, this weapon doesn't fire in as rapid succession as the blasters do, and its shots are generally less accurate.

The ships final weapon is a lock-on missile launcher. When fired, it chooses up to six enemies ahead of the player and shoots a missile at each. Once fired, the missiles are guaranteed to hit their given targets; however, the missiles have the longest reload timer, so they ought to be saved for overwhelming hordes or larger enemies.

The other feature the ship has is a boost: this is specifically useful for dodging bullets; although it can be used to speed through stretches of empty terrain as well.

In terms of graphical effects, Star Republic makes heavy use of pixels shaders to produce a pleasing bloom effect. This is used to represent bullets, thrusters, explosions, and important objectives.

To ensure a high frame rate while maintaining our visual style, we incorporated a number of important graphical techniques. For one, we are using models with different levels of detail to ensure unnecessary vertices are not constantly being drawn. In conjunction with view frustum-culling, Star Republic incorporates a uniform spatial data structure to restrict the number of objects being managed at once.

One distinguishing feature of Star Republic is path choosing: many arcade-shooters are limited to a single linear path; however, this game gives the player the option to choose which path they take around the asteroid.

In the demo level, there is a total of three unique paths available for the player to explore; each eventually loops back, allowing the player to explore other paths to find all of the objectives in one seamless looping level.