Information
Barry Belcher and I wrote Defender for Professor Maxim‘s CIS 487 class at the University of Michigan – Dearborn. Defender is an arcade-style game where you control a spaceship and must survive multiple enemy assaults to deliver vital supplies to Xanthu VII, which is under attack by evil humans from the dreaded RAID foundation. For this game, Barry and I spent a lot of time creating/finding graphics to give the game a better visual appearance than Tank Game. We wanted to spend more time on visual appearance rather than game engine versatility. However, we did make sure to produce an overall code structure that would avoid the inherent design flaws in Tank Game. Especially annoying in Tank Game was that if you minimized it, the graphics device would be permanently lost, preventing resumption of play when the game was restored. From the lessons learned in Tank Game, we were able to write Defender to minimize and restore properly.
Of course, just like in Tank Game, you can type UBERCHEATER really fast (once the game has started) to enable cheats. Press the number keys to toggle them!
Some screenshots of the game:
Downloading and Running
Current Version: 1.00
Click here to download Defender V1.00 (9.91 MB). To run it, extract ALL of the files from the zip file to a directory. It is important to extract ALL of the files in the zip to the same location so that Defender.exe can find the image and sound files. If you run Defender.exe directly from the zip file, you will get an error message.