Starting out in PICO-8 game dev, I wanted to make something thrilling, as I hadn't seen many action games for the platform. I was craving a PICO-8 game with twitchy combat, high difficulty, and satisfying game-feel and visual polish.
So, over the last few months, I've been developing Icebreaker, a skill-based arena brawler. I'm really happy with how this final build turned out, and I hope to continue developing the idea into the future. Thanks for checking this project out, and your feedback and constructive criticism is highly appreciated!
Follow on Itch.io: https://wsasaki01.itch.io/
Follow Icebreaker's development on Github: https://github.com/wsasaki01/icebreaker
Gameplay
Ice and Reflex
Ice enemies are attacking, and you're the last line of defense against the onslaught. Defeat waves of enemies using your hammer and reflexes!
Intense Combat
Throw the hammer to smash through groups of enemies, and roll to re-position and gain the advantage. Faster enemies are orange or red; kill them for even more points, and keep your combo up to get a multiplier and earn massive scores!
Customisable Weapon
Hammer types introduce new gameplay mechanics to switch up the pace and flow of combat.
Mods change the properties of your hammer, changing its strengths and weaknesses.
Mix-and-match hammer types and mods to make the perfect build!
Controls
Normal
- Without the hammer equipped, press ❎ to roll
- This gives you invincible frames, so roll through enemies to avoid damage!
- Run over the hammer to pick it up
- With the hammer equipped:
- Press ❎ to hit (damage around you)
- Hold a direction and press 🅾️ to throw
Magnet
Hold 🅾️ to attract your hammer back to you!
Teleport
Press 🅾️ to teleport to your hammer!
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The game feel of this one is great! It's so... Meaty. You really feel the weight of the hammer and enemies.
This is the kind of thing my friends and I would have played to death if we had it on the NES. I'm tempted to add a two-player mode for that reason.
Terrific work!
Saw this randomly on Splore and it feels really good to play. Surprisingly polished as well. Great job!
This is so good!
It really does fill that gap in pico8 games you mentioned, and is also really tough.
The polish is great and makes the game feel amazing to play. Though I do feel the hammer/projectile sprite when on the ground looks a bit like a placeholder? Is it supposed to be like an ice scraper?
Also adding some animation to the enemies would be cool (um, also not entirely sure what they are, look like boxes with an ear and an eye but because they don't turn to face the player they look like icicles?).
[also also, maybe adding more enemy types that maybe shoot something but are stationary? More variety like that could be interesting]
the modular build stuff is great and the tutorial introduces it all nicely. the extra strategies are excellent too (not killing slow enemies, trying to stay on exactly 2 hearts). I played 3B endless with reverse teleport and got to wave 17 or so -- really fun!
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