Scramble, Scramble!!

The Gear Empire has invaded your star system. Pilot the Blue Raptor to defeat 15 waves of enemies by shooting them down with bullets or by crushing them with your Iron Egg!

This game is a shoot-em-up with a breakout/"Arkanoid" twist!

Controls:

Arrow Keys to move
Press X to shoot bullets
Release X to reload bullets
Press Z to throw the Iron Egg

Tips:

Shoot the Iron Egg with bullets to make the Egg bounce back up and destroy your enemies!
The Iron Egg will bounce off the player ship!
The "Heart" shape in the center of the Iron Egg will tell you what diagonal direction the egg is moving
This game is actually hard. Don't feel too bad for using continues!

Updates:

10/1/2022:

Iron Egg can now bounce off the player ship.
Unlimited bullets! (removed ammo reload)
Buffed enemies' HP as players no longer need to reload between shots.
Buffed Iron Egg damage.

11/4/2022:

This should be the final set of changes:

Reverted to limited ammo (players must reload).
Reverted to original Iron Egg damage and Enemy HP.
Changed button inputs to start game, continue game, and re-start game to improve user experience.

Over the past month, I experimented with allowing players to play the game with unlimited ammo (by removing the reload function entirely). While the feedback I received was generally positive, I found that this invalidated the core game mechanic of juggling the Iron Egg as a main source of damage entirely. Players reported that though juggling the Iron Egg with limited ammo was tricky, juggling the Iron Egg with unlimited ammo "felt like a chore" - it became too easy and trivialized the entire game.

While I am absolutely keeping the ability for the Iron Egg to bounce off the Blue Raptor (the player ship), I am reverting the changes I made to the ammo system.

Developer's Notes:

This is the first game I've ever developed. I don't have a programming background - all I've done previously is mess around with Unity. I started developing this project when I realized that Unity and its physics engine really spoiled me, and as a result, I approached every programming challenge in terms of Unity's physics engine... which is a very narrow and self-limiting way to program.

Therefore I started looking for game engines that were the opposite of Unity. Because of how powerful (I think?) and broad Unity's tools are, I realized that Unity lent itself well to very big (and unfortunately, bloated) projects. I wanted something very barebones and limiting, so I settled on Pico-8. The restrictions surrounding Pico-8 (limited token, character, and sprite count) appealed to me as I wanted to quickly assemble a small project I could be proud of.

I don't think I could have made a better decision in my journey to improve at game development and programming. Pico-8's restrictions made it necessary for me to teach myself things like object-oriented programming, writing clean code, and making arrays. I also appreciate that this project forced me to approach programming problems mathematically. Again, Unity and its physics engine really spoiled me.

All that aside, there are definitely things I feel I could have done better. I wish I had documented my game development process better, and I'm certain there's a lot of stuff I could have written more efficiently. A lot of game mechanics I wanted to put in (i.e. power-ups, more enemy types, more waves of enemies) were cut out as a result.

Overall this was a tremendously positive experience for me, and I hope you will have fun playing my game!

ALSO: big thanks to Gruber! All tracks in this game were taken from "Pico-8 Tunes Vol.2."

Additional Thanks To:

Lazy Devs/Krystman for Pico-8 tutorials
Yu-Gi-Oh! I'm awful at creature design, so I based the enemy designs off some of my favorite Monsters from my childhood. Comment if you can figure out which ones they are!
My Mom. Thanks for being the best <3

kollumos • 2022-09-09 2022-09-09 14:53

Very vool! Would suggest removing ammo, its just jarring. Nice concept and execution.

yoko8 • 2022-11-04*2022-11-04 09:25*

@/kollumos: I tried a little experiment over the past month where I removed the ammo system. Though the feedback I received was generally positive, I realized this invalidated the core game mechanic of juggling the Iron Egg as a main source of damage entirely. Players reported that though juggling the Iron Egg with limited ammo was tricky, juggling the Iron Egg with unlimited ammo "felt like a chore" - it became too easy and trivialized the entire game.

Hence I've put it back in :P