I'm trying to learn C#/MonoGame by coding a short demo in a number of game genres/styles, ideally in increasing complexity. This is my attempt at Space Invaders.

After making Breakout I thought this would be very straightforward, after all on paper it's just Breakout with lasers! But there were a few complexities I didn't account for until I got coding, and ran into a few bugs that delayed things.

I had the game 90% complete with static sprites before deciding to animate the aliens. This turned out to be a big mistake! I was using Texture.Width/Height for a lot of calculations so the introduction of a spritesheet resulted in a lot of subtle bugs and refactoring. I thought it would have been relatively easy to go from static sprites to animated, and that it would be common in the game dev process to use static sprites as a placeholder before replacing with animation. That might still be the case, but it's definitely something that needs to be planned. Lesson learnt.

I'm very happy with the alien swarm; realising that aliens only fire when there's no alien in front of them had me worried, but I was surprised by how quickly I had that coded. Same for the destructible bunkers, which were fun to code.

There's a lot of messy stuff, some horrible hardcoded numbers, inheritance was badly planned and caused a lot of frustration, and I still struggle to decide what the best approach is between using public static classes or instances being passed around. But this was a very good learning experience to code from scratch.