🚀 Building a Galaxian Game with Amazon Q CLI

#awschallenge #awsqcli #aws #amazonqcli

🎮 Introduction

Galaxian fixed shooter video game. The player assumes control of the ship in its mission to protect Earth from waves of aliens. Gameplay involves destroying each formation of aliens, who dive down towards the player in an attempt to hit them.

🖥️ What Is Amazon Q CLI?

Amazon Q Developer CLI is a command-line tool that integrates with Amazon Q, a generative AI-powered assistant, to provide developers with a more efficient and intelligent development experience. It brings features like IDE-style autocomplete, natural language chat, and agentic capabilities directly to the terminal, streamlining tasks and improving developer productivity.

🎯 The Goal

To build a working Galaxian-style fixed shooter game that

Features classic alien waves attacking the player's spaceship.
Includes two powerups, Shield that protects the ship for 30 seconds and Rocket Launcher that destroys enemies within a certain radius.
Has improved graphics and timed power-up drops.

🧠 Prompts Used with Q CLI

Initially I started with this prompt

Create a galaxian game using pygame in python. 
Galaxian is a space themed fixed shooter game.

For the above prompt, Amazon Q CLI it took care of the heavy lifting:

It set up a basic Pygame project structure.
Implemented a working Galaxian-style game loop.
Gave me a solid codebase to enhance further.

Once the base of the game is set, I have asked it to enchance the game by adding additional powerups and also asked to enchance the GUI to look nice. With the below prompt

Add these additional power-ups in the game
- Shield for 30 Secs which will protect the galaxip from the enemies.
- Rocket launcher which will destroy enemies within some radius.
These power-ups should be dropped like in certain time interval.
Make the game look nice with good graphics.

For the above prompt

It added the Shield and Rocket Launcher powerup logic, complete with a timer and visual effect.
Set up timed intervals for the powerups to drop.
Improved the visuals — including background effects, sprite enhancements, and simple animations for powerups.

🕹️ Game Features

Classic Gameplay
Shield PowerUp
Rocket Launcher PowerUp
Unique Patterns of enemies

👨🏻‍💻 What I Learned

The time to idea to prototyping can be done in minutes using AI tools like Amazon Q CLI, which helps the developers spend less time in scaffolding, creating a boilerplate code and gets you started with a working code in no time.
If these tools integrated with a wide variety of external tools with the help of MCP, then it will be more powerful and helps the developers to go to production with natural prompts.