Java Games Programming - Space Invaders

Space Invaders is perhaps the most well-known computer game of all time. It was first released in Japan in 1978 and initially ran on a Intel 8080 with an awesome clockspeed of... 2 MHz! The machines you will be using today to write a similar game will have clock speeds in excess of 2 GHz.

In this tutorial we will create a similar game using the Java programming language. The purpose of this exercise is to give you an initial introduction into graphics programming.

Warning! Although this game looks incredible simply and may not be able to contain you for the same amount of time as Halo 2, there are still ~1000 lines of code. The game that we will start with looks something like this:

If we're honest that is not the most exciting looking game so we will look to spice it up by adding a background image. For example:

We could then apply a similar technique for the alien army and the space ship:

In addition to these visual tweaks we will look at changing other aspects of the game. Ok, lets get started with the code! It is essential that you complete the following two steps first:

Now you can choose from these other options to personalise your game.