The Arcade is a collection of classic arcade games (Tetris, Asteroids, Arkanoid) cloned into my own custom framework build upon SFML. This project was my final project of my undergraduate course spanning nearly 6 months from March to late August. I chose this project as I was working on my own and it required minimal artwork but also because the different games allowed me to adapt the scope to my performance, I could add or remove a game if I was making better or worse than expected progress.

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The standout features of the project are of course the games. I spent a lot of time and effort on polishing the games, adding sounds, particle effects and extra features to improve the experience when playing any of the games on show. This provides strong feedback to the player to inform them of what is occurring in-game and adds visual flare to each game for a fun-to-play experience. Tetris and Asteroids both feature 2-player modes; in Tetris players compete side-by-side to achieve a higher score than each other, while in Asteroids the two players work collaboratively to survive the waves of asteroids and enemies to defeat the boss asteroid.

All games are complemented by individual high-score leaderboards displayed at the end of each match and on the main menu screen. The game features a settings menu for the user to alter audio volumes and particle effect intensity (for low-end machines).

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To build the clones, I started with SFML, an open-source framework allowing me to create a window and display images to it. On this foundation I built my own small game engine, allowing me the flexibility to create 3 different games in a single executable without duplicating code. The engine provides different rendering layers, optimised collision hitmasks, UI & menu creation, controller configurations, particle systems and much more. Creating the engine was the task that took most of my time with the sheer amount of different systems required before a game could be made.

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By the deadline to create this project I had 3 games, running solidly during the BCU NTI Showcase for the entire day with no crashes or glitches, with Tetris gaining lots of attention as a competitive favourite. The code for the project had reached 22592 lines including comments but not blank lines.

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Feel free to download the games from the links to the right but please note the games were designed for using the DualShock4 (PS4) Controller and other controllers may not be configured correctly for the games provided.