Making a retro inspired shoot 'em up in 2 days

 Developing Virex: A Retro-Inspired Journey

Two evenings, minimal assets, and a strong dose of inspiration from classic arcade games—this was the foundation of Virex, a fast-paced, score-driven 2D game heavily influenced by Asteroids and other golden-age titles. While the idea for the game was simple, implementing it introduced a variety of new techniques that expanded my Unity skill set.

The Core Concept

The premise of Virex revolves around the player navigating a simple yet challenging environment while fending off enemy threats. With only movement, shooting, and a regenerating shield to rely on, the player must rack up points while staying alive. Enemies spawn dynamically, and a rare Bonus Enemy appears every 500 points, offering extra scoring opportunities.

Game Management & Tracking

One of the major takeaways from this project was the implementation of a Game Management System. Instead of handling everything in isolated scripts, I used a centralized ScoreManager to track score updates and trigger events. This approach made it easier to handle elements like spawning bonus enemies when the player reaches certain point thresholds:

if (scoreManager.GetScore() >= nextSpawnScore)
{
    SpawnBonusEnemy();
    nextSpawnScore += scoreThreshold;
}

This simple yet effective system ensured that bonus enemies only spawned at the correct intervals, preventing unintended multiple spawns per frame. I had never used a dedicated Game Management System before for any of my projects, and I certainly will start implementing for future games. It made me life a heck of a lot easier!

Enemy and Bonus Enemy Behaviors

Unlike standard enemies, the Bonus Enemy follows a different movement pattern. Instead of homing in on the player, it moves in a random straight-line direction and wraps around the screen when it reaches the edges—similar to Asteroids. This required learning how to detect when an object exits the screen and reposition it accordingly.

if (transform.position.x > screenBounds.x)
    transform.position = new Vector2(-screenBounds.x, transform.position.y);

This created a seamless transition, keeping the enemy in play without abrupt disappearance.

A Minimalist Approach to Assets

One of my goals for Virex was to keep assets minimal—no fancy sprites, no elaborate animations. The visual elements consisted primarily of special fonts for UI elements and simple geometric shapes. For audio, I used basic sound effects to enhance the game feel, particularly when the player takes damage or destroys an enemy. The idea was to build this game quickly, with a focus on clean, minimalistic design, with the heart of the game residing in the code and gameplay.

A Simple but Effective Game Over System

A new technique I learned was how to handle game-over states properly. When the player's shield reaches zero, the game pauses and displays a "Game Over" message. One trick I picked up from the Galaxian port on the Atari 2600 console is the ability to restart the game with a simple press of the fire button - which I also implement here:

if (Input.GetButtonDown("Fire1"))
{
    SceneManager.LoadScene(SceneManager.GetActiveScene().name);
}

Final Thoughts

Despite being developed in a short time frame, Virex turned out to be a great learning experience and honestly, it's a pretty fun little game. While testing the gameplay out I kept finding myself restarting the game to try to beat my previous high score - which is always the sign that you're doing something right. Implementing a structured game management system, working with screen wrapping, and handling conditional enemy spawning were all valuable lessons that will carry over to future projects. I'll probably eventually end up doing a separate build of this one to post on my itch.io page and make it playable in a web browser.