04
PROJECT
Status
Shipped
Stack
  • / React
  • / Canvas

Indy's Manifest Destiny

Space Invaders, except you were the invader all along.

A Space Invaders clone built on an uncomfortable realisation: in the original, you're the one descending on a planet, blasting the ships scrambling to defend their home. So this version owns it. You play Emperor Indy, leading the invasion of the galaxy one defended homeworld at a time.

Built on the second bottle of wine, the same evening I built the Cherokee flight sim. A friend was helping me move; we'd stopped at a hotel; we'd just finished the Cherokee and were genuinely impressed at what Claude had done with the flight model. We wanted to see what else it could do.

The starting input was a folder containing one image: a photo of my puppy, Indiana Bones, with his tongue sticking out. The premise came from there, in the spirit of the Mitchell-and-Webb Are we the baddies? sketch. What if Space Invaders had been telling the truth from the start, and you were always the one descending on a planet, blasting the ships scrambling to defend their homeworld? In this version you play Emperor Indy, glibly and gleefully genociding worlds one defended homeworld at a time. Each world has its own theme.

Hit B and the autopilot takes the controls. That started as a way to debug the game and ended up being my favourite way to watch it. Two hours, no plan.