Lego Blaster: Champions of Plastic

Brought to you by Andrew Adams (abadams@stanford.edu) and Mark Kwan (markkwan@stanford.edu)


Story:

Your mothership has crash landed on an asteroid while in battle with another ship. It is your job to collect the 20 lego bricks that will be required to fix your ship. Collect the bricks and return them to the flag, otherwise your competition may blow you out of the sky and take your hard earned bricks for themself!

Lego Blaster is a fast 1 to 4-player competitive game designed and built on Linux and Windows.

Action:

Weapons that can be attached to your ship have been strewn about the asteroid surface, use them to fight off your opponents. Varied pickups include heat seeking missiles, defensive lightning shields, booster rockets and stealth modules.

Key Features:

  • Multiplayer splitscreen play for up to four players, human or computer
  • A spherical terrain generated from Perlin noise, with continuous levels of detail up to over 2 million polygons at the highest level of detail, dynamic loading and unloading of areas for a low memory footprint, and a cleverly designed vertex shader for high speed
  • On screen HUD including overhead radar
  • Particle systems and other physical effects for engine trails, weapons, and explosions
  • Neural network AI goal picking for computer players, whose only way to interact with the world is through the same keys a human can press. AI state is trained during play with a genetic algorithm and saved for later games, adapting the AI to your style of play.
  • Ship dynamics controlled by Newtonian physics, with reliable collision detection
  • A starscape and sun with solar effects and ship shadows
  • General 3D view frustum culling
  • Minimal use of texturing for a genuine LEGO look and feel
  • Stereo sound (using a 3rd party sound library, FMOD)

Controls:

Player 1Player 2Player 3Player 4
Forward W [UP ARROW] 8 [MOUSE BUTTON RIGHT]
Left A [LEFT ARROW] 4 [MOUSE LEFT]
Right D [RIGHT ARROW] 6 [MOUSE RIGHT]
Fire Left Q [BACKSPACE] 0 [MOUSE BUTTON LEFT]
Fire RightE \ 1 [MOUSE BUTTON MIDDLE]
Playing with fewer players allow you to use unused controls (eg. in single player mode you can use any controls you want).

Screenshots:


4-player splitscreen

Lightning defense!


Solar halo over the horizon

Returning to base


Heading into the sun

Sneak stealth attack with heatseeking missiles


Full burn with dual boosters

Download:

Get Linux version (.tar.gz, 5.95 MB)
Get Windows version (.zip, 5.07 MB)

System Requirements:

- Pentium 4/Athlon XP
- 256MB RAM
- GeForce 2 or equivalent

Troubleshooting:

If the frame rate is low, graphical settings can be altered by changing the level of detail settings.
- Use the '-minlod [0-3]' and '-maxlod [1-3]' command line options to alter the LOD settings
You can run game in window mode with '-window'.
You can change resolution and bit depth by passing in a GLUT game mode string with '-fullscreen ####x###:##'