Game with modern user interface (UI) inspired by retro arcade cabinets. Written in C# using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Prototyped in Adobe XD.

    Inspired by retro arcade game mechanics and visuals, Symbol Blaster is an old-school, 2-D shooter game with modern twists. Whereas many games from the "Golden Age" of arcade systems featured static, pre-defined game object geometries, Symbol Blaster allows the player to customize the geometries and colors of all major game objects ("Sprites") in real-time. Changing the geometry of a Sprite in Symbol Blaster also changes that Sprite's underlying hit-test geometry, resulting in subtle game-play variations based on the sizes and shapes of customized Sprites.

    Symbol Blaster features a Model-View-ViewModel (M-V-VM) architecture to implement the UI and game world. A MainViewModel governs the state and behavior of the UI, while a GameViewModel governs the state and behavior of the game. The eXtensible Application Markup Language (XAML) code that defines the "skeleton" of the UI incorporates the ViewModel logic through various data-bindings that enable the user to influence application state. Since the UI navigation topology is fixed at compile time, navigation is handled by a simple TabControl populated with TabItems that contain collapsible sections. Both the front-end XAML and the back-end ViewModel components are modular in order to foster development efficiency and easier maintenance. NUnit is the unit testing framework used to conduct automated testing of the application.

For a more detailed explanation of the code, a blog post about the project is available here.

• Modern "flat" UI prototyped in Adobe XD and implemented in XAML
• User Experience (UX) features for streamlined usage:
  • informative tooltips
  • dynamically resizable text
  • game control mapping visualization
  • form submission management
  • fluid-resize of applicaton
• Rudimentary game mechanics
• Custom update loop rendering performed via a CompositionTarget.Rendering event handler
• Unit tested with NUnit

    The repository consists of two Visual Studio projects - the SymbolBlaster project and an NUnit test project. Opening the SymbolBlaster/SymbolBlaster.sln file in Visual Studio should allow both projects to be built and run.