Download Asp (Java 1.6 required; source code included).
Retrospective comments on Asp's creation:
Asp Engineering
Asp Art
Asp Design
Asp Evaluation
Asp is a 2D, top-down, space combat tactics game inspired by the space combat scenes in Ender's Game and Star Wars. It grew out of two previous experimental projects that I started in high school (see the blog post on the subject for more). It is my first college project and was my most ambitious 2D game attempted.
Greg Costikyan (*swoon*) commented that "Asp is, fundamentally, an exploration of the limitations and advantages of AI opponents.... You could almost see this basic structure being elaborated upon and becoming a commercial game, with different AI behaviors for opponents and more sophisticated player squadrons introduced over time. But it's worth playing even without that for its originality and focus on one particular design issue."
In Asp, the player represents the hive mind controlling a group of alien "ships" that fight with human forces. (I figured that there was a stereotype that alien hive minds were evil, e.g. The Zerg, Buggers, Flood, etc., so they're the good guys here.) The player's ships are arranged by squads, each of which can be given orders in the form of sequential waypoints. Every 10 seconds, the game pauses to allow the player to issue new orders and then continue the game.
While enemy ships can constantly react to the ongoing battle, they can be tricked through clever maneuvers.
In this example, the player's smaller, faster ships have lured the enemy fighters into a central position at which the more offensively powerful ships can fire at will.
The main campaign of Asp includes a short story that follows the events of a colonizing Asp swarm entering the Sol system. The story is delivered through illustrations created by Olex Ponomarenko, a friend of mine.
Praise for Asp, unabashedly cherry-picked from these reddit comments:
"Cool :D I finished the campaign. It was fun.... Great job and thanks for the source and commentary"
"The enemy units are far smarter than your minions at the unit level which means you have to compensate for your minions' stupidity with a better overall strategy. It's actually quite brilliant and I don't think I've seen it done in a game before."
"I just beat the first level. It's hard, but in a challenging way. I really like it so far."
"It's a really great game, just beat the orbital cannons level in campaign mode. It's a very nice challenge. Twice I died when the opponent had only one ship left. Reminds me of Ender's Game. Perhaps it was the inspiration for this game?"
"Hats off to you my good man!! Great stuff!"
"Thank you for making it a .Jar! A game for Linux! Thank you for this, and it's incredibly fun. It's hard, really hard, but I love challenges."
"Thank you for the hours of development. For the seemingly endless lines of code that you had to SQUEEZ out. And for all of the passion you put into this. By my watch, this is a hit. :)"
"I have to agree with the comments above. It's difficult, but not frustratingly difficult. It's pretty fun."
"That's actually way cooler than I thought it would be. I thought it was really hard at first, but then I kind of got the hang of it, you know where you have to actually use tactics. But after a while I gave up and continued my Calculus homework, hehe."
"Wow. I was actually thinking about programming a game like this. Oh well, this is awesome."