Avian Blasters

Authors

• Mariam Baloch
• Beatrice Micolucci
• Filippo Velli

Abstract

“Avian Blasters” is a single-player, fixed-screen arcade shoot ’em up—built in Python with Pygame—where the player drives a car along the bottom of the screen, dodging and shooting through endless waves of Avian foes. Birds advance in formation while Bats home in using sound-wave attacks, and defeated enemies can drop power-ups (e.g., invincibility, laser). The game features a retro audiovisual style, difficulty selection, and a local high-score leaderboard; all gameplay is offline and runs in a single process on the user’s machine. Developed as part of a university Software Engineering project, the design emphasizes a clean layered/MVC architecture and maintainable, testable code.

Disclaimer

Throughout the project, ChatGPT was occasionally used as a support resource, particularly to analyze errors and receive suggestions on best practices to follow (for example, to ask which design options were more optimal). All content generated or suggested by the tool was reviewed, adapted, and integrated by the author, who takes full responsibility for the final report/artifact. (This disclaimer applies specifically to the design and implementation of the game items and to the author who handled them)