ZED is a 2D Sidescroll Shooter developed in XNA Game Studio 4.0 and programmed in C#. The game is best described as “Contra meets Gradius”. It combines the 2D Shooter gameplay of the Contra series with challenging autoscroll levels and a unique power-up system inspired by Gradius. In the game, the player takes control of ZED, an alien from the race of Berserkians who are invading earth to add it to their collection of conquered planets. A twist on the classic concept of defending earth from aliens. This time, you’re actually trying to take over earth instead of protecting it.
ZED was my first project at Games Academy, as well as my first project working on a team of dedicated and passionate game developers and also the first complex game I ever programmed. Gameplay, physics, collision detection and UIs (among other things) were all programmed by myself. The game also used Lua scripts for debugging, providing a practical interface for the Game Designer. Later on I even added DirectInput support to the game, using the Direct X wrapper library SlimDX.
By the time the project phase had ended, only a single fully playable level was finished for the game. This was due to the team’s lack of project planning experience in the first semester. A skill that significantly improved for all of us with each consecutive project.
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(Confirmed working on Windows 7 with Visual Studio and XNA Game Studio 4.0 installed)
The team:
Marius Pieroth – Team Lead, Art
Benjamin Sauer – Art, Audio
Tobias Grimm – Game Design
Markus Wall – Programming