Aristotle's Axis

Why did you choose the name Aristotle’s Axis?

The Greek philosopher Aristotle conjectured that the Earth was the center of the universe, unmoving, and all else in the universe rotated around it. Since the salient feature of the game was that everything rotates around your ship, I thought that it was an appropriate name.

I had thought other ideas about things being at the center of something, like narcissism, egotism, hubs and self-centeredness, but they all seemed too negative or too boring–Narcisuss’s Hub doesn’t sound very good. Aristotle’s Axis sounds cool, at least to me.

Why did you choose this perspective of the universe rotating around you?

One of my favorite arcade video games was Assault, by Namco. It had the same center view but you were driving a tank (and it had a great two-joystick control system). I always thought that this perspective was cool, but I rarely, if ever, saw any games come out that had this perspective. I figured that I would make one.

What did you use to create the game

It was written in ActionScript 3.0 using Flex Builder with other tools for explosions and sounds.

How did you create the explosions

The explosions were pre-rendered by drawing PNGs using the Python Imaging Library (and the AggDraw module for anti-aliasing). Since I have many different types of explosions of large size, and I wanted to the overall SWF to be under 10 megs, I stitched the explosion PNGs together into SWFs using SWFTools and then “unroll” them back into independent images at the initalization of the game. I need to have them as independent images because playing a SWF for every explosion is too slow, given the large number of explosions, so instead I blit all of the images.

How were the sound effects created

I pulled most of the sound effects from The Freesound Project. It is a tremendous resource and I highly recommend it. Sound effects were added by embedding WAV files into SWF files using SWFMill that had a WAV file patch added (compiled using Cygwin). Actually, getting sounds to work was an unpleasant surprise in that mp3s are too slow to work as sound effects and WAV files are too big to fit in my 10 meg SWF. After getting SWFMill to work, everything was great though. If you don’t want to go the open-source route, you can embed WAV files into SWCs using CS4.

What about the soundtrack?

I did a web search for cool music. My first great find was Incompetech where a composer named Kevin MacLeod puts up royalty-free music. When I heard his piece “Frost Waltz” I knew that it needed to be the theme song for the game.

What’s with the graphics?

I wanted an old school Asteroids + Galaga/Galaxian type look to the game. Clearly I’m not an artist. I have gained a healthy respect for artists.

What was your motivation for creating a game

I work as a professional software engineer. When I try to tell people what I do, either their eyes glaze over with boredom or I just can’t explain what I enjoy about it. I figured that if I wrote a video game I could easily show people something that I do since video games are accessible to the layman.