Star Blaster is a 2D arcade-style space shooter developed with a strong emphasis on performance optimization, modular architecture, and scalable system design. Rather than building a simple shooter, the goal of this project was to apply clean coding principles and structured game architecture similar to professional development standards.

One of the main challenges I faced was performance instability caused by frequent bullet instantiation and destruction during intense combat. This led to minor frame drops due to memory allocation and garbage collection. To solve this, I implemented an object pooling system that preloads bullets and reuses inactive instances instead of destroying them, resulting in stable frame rates even during heavy action sequences.

Another challenge was creating a flexible enemy spawning system. Initially, the spawning logic was rigid and difficult to expand. I redesigned it into a modular wave-based system where enemy count, spawn timing, and difficulty scaling are data-driven, making it easy to introduce new enemy types and progression mechanics.

Additionally, I separated gameplay, UI, and state management using an event-driven approach to prevent tight coupling between systems. A centralized game state manager ensures consistent transitions between menu, gameplay, and game-over states.