Battleship Antarctica
| Battleship Antarctica | |
|---|---|
 The game's title screen | |
| Developer(s) | Alien8 |
| Publisher(s) | Top Hat Software |
| Artist(s) | James Atkin |
| Composer(s) | Ozzed |
| Platform(s) | Java |
| Release | 27 July 2018 |
| Genre(s) | Tactical shooter |
| Website | |
Battleship Antarctica is a free top-down tactical shooter game that was partially developed in the Empire of Adammia. It was developed by a team of second-year undergraduate computer science students at the University of Birmingham known as Alien8 in the spring term of 2018; Emperor Adam I was a member of this team. Later, in July 2018, the Emperor's company Top Hat Software published the game on Alien8's behalf. It was Top Hat Software's first release since The Lion Game (2014).
Gameplay
In Battleship Antarctica, the player controls a battleship in a randomly-generated ice field. The aim of the game is to destroy enemy battleships without being destroyed oneself; in this way, the game bears some similarity to the "battle royale" genre. Ships can pick up various power-ups (such as extra speed and rapid-fire) dropped from aircraft which fly overhead. The ships each have two gun turrets (front and rear); to make gameplay more difficult, players must consider the distance to their target, and must "charge up" their shots in order to fire further.
The game has single-player and multiplayer modes, although multi-player is only designed to work over a local area network (LAN) and does not work well over the Internet.
Development
Battleship Antarctica was developed for a 20-credit group project module for second-year undergraduates at UoB's School of Computer Science. The members of the team, which was chosen randomly, were James Atkin, Alexandru Brăcău, Emperor Adam I (credited by his British legal name, Adam Belcher), Alex Morrison, Felix Cheung and Lingyi Zhang. The name Alien8 is derived from the 1985 video game Alien 8, and was assigned by the module's supervisor, Dr. Ian Kenny.
The initial concept of the game was devised by the Emperor. Brăcău and Atkin were de facto lead developers and constructed most of the game's overarching structure; Atkin also designed the game's art. The Emperor developed the game's rendering system, which was heavily derived from his cancelled 2014 project Interstellar Voyage; this, in turn, was based on the simple rendering system used in Rain, a demonstration game written by Yan "TheCherno" Chernikov for a game development tutorial series on YouTube. Cheung and Zhang were the game's network developers. Morrison wrote the game's procedural terrain generation, and the artificial intelligence used by enemy ships in the game's single-player mode.
The parts of the game which were written in Adammia are those which were written by the Emperor, who did most of his programming at his home in the province of Serkatia (although he did sometimes work on the university campus itself). The rest of the game was developed in the United Kingdom.
Reception
When the game was evaluated by Dr. Kenny, he was moderately impressed; the team scored 67% of the total marks available for the module, a high 2:1.
