Personally, I wouldn't give Morazan's Animated Problem Solving a big recommend for someone trying to self-teach CS1, especially not when HtDP and How to Code are free. In my opinion, APS is a bit over-stuffed (it has a tendency to throw relatively advanced terms, like property-based testing, at the beginning student without much follow-through) and it can sometimes make exercises (including the game ones) overly complex and tedious.
I don't think HtDP is without criticism, but if you can get through the admittedly slow first section, it's a great textbook. Alternatively, you can work through UBC's How to Code (H2C), which has a brisker pace. Note that you can actually access the version of the H2C for UBC students at the CS110 course page [0], just click on the link to enroll in the "edX Edge course". It appears to be an updated version of the original course with some small additions.
I found the first section of HtDP a bit slow myself, so I ended up working through H2C first. I only came back to HtDP because I found some of H2C's explanations of the later material shallow, but more importantly, I felt that the exercises were generally lacking in challenge. Nonetheless, I can't recommend H2C enough. Gregor is a friendly, patient teacher, and the H2C presentation of the design recipes somehow seems more fine-grained than HtDP's versions without feeling overly complicated.
I had HTDP on my to-learn list and the parent comment somehow put a damper on it.
The space-invaders project sounds fun.