Yello! This is a game I made for this months' BLITZKAST. Spent about 7 hours on it sunday, then spent the rest of the week polishing it up and adding some features.
Theres a trailer:
Theres a microsite:
http://www.frankiesmileshow.com/altcode/So whats that game about?Hordes of robotic ships from another world threaten the earth. As the newly self-aware hive mind of every CRT monitor display humans threw away to replace with fancy flat screen plasma tvs, you have to prove your worth and defend those who originally created you. Maybe they will want you back?!!
The robot hordes keep growing, whether you are playing or not. Gotta keep playin.
There's three ships you can play with. The light ship is tiny and fast but has a weak shot and dies quickly. The Heavy ship is awkward and slow, fires in a weird pattern, but pretty strong. Medium ship is somewhere in-between. Killing lots of robots upgrades your ship and lets you play longer. The more you play, the harder it gets, and the more the robot horde numbers dwindle. Slowly, through several doomed attempts, you chip away at their numbers. Eventually their great mothership is vulnerable, and you can try a desperate assault inside.
I made the game, Chef Boyardee made a remix of a classic shmup song for the soundtrack.
where does that game come from?I made most of the game last Sunday for the Blitzkast. I wanted to make a game using ASCII graphics for a long time, so I thought this was the perfect excuse to finally do it. I settled on a shmup because it seemed like it would be fun and a little atypical. I didn't know at the time, but Stargoat here had already made an
ASCII shoot-em-up, and a pretty good one at that.
After finishing up a very simple, bare-bones Shoot-em-up in ASCII for the blitzkast, I ended up spending a good bit of the rest of the week polishing it up, trying to make the gameplay feel better and trying to find a little something unique to add to the game's concept. It had a little upgrades thing going with the firing speed, firepower and movement speed, but that was it, it was pretty generic. The movement and shooting was also kind of sluggish.
I ended up making the game keep a persistent count of enemies you kill, and created this "enemies count" which keeps growing even when the game isn't running, using the current date and time of your computer. It seemed like a simple but effective way to "tie together" a players' separate runs of the game, so even if you know you wont win, you are still sort of getting closer to a longer-term goal. Im not sure how effective it is yet, its hard to tell. I added a proper ending for the (otherwise endless) game, which is set off whenever you get the remaining enemies count down to 0. Then a special, super difficult level starts in which you fight a "final boss", beating it unlocks a fourth ship.
I am interested in feedback and comments!
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