Controls
Gameplay
- Collect Holy Water to fill your Flasks and Level Up! Each Level will grant a different powerful Blessing. Activating a Blessing will consume all flasks.
Development
My first video game! Coded entirely on PICO-8 in May 2024, while restlessly tuning into the Lazy Devs Shmup PICO-8 Tutorial.
This was also my first PICO-8 project, and it won't be my last.
I originally envisioned Astro X to let you choose "Heaven" or "Hell" with each version giving the player a different experience - each version would deliver different enemies, wave layouts, Blessing abilities, and a different final boss.
The pros? Two games in one!
The cons? I have to make two games.
Since this was my first project, I decided to simplify things and keep the code as close to the Lazy Devs tutorial as I could. My goal was to make a game, not design one. Still, you will see that the Blessing system and much of the visual design survived the cut.
Credits
All coding, SFX, and graphics done by me, Billy Cross.
Check it out on itch.io as well! https://ohjiohji.itch.io/astrox
Special thanks to
Krystman and his Lazy Devs Academy for the tutorials and resources! https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?uid=16423
Robby Duguay for the wonderfully composed Final Boss music, "Out of Control" https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?uid=11038
AchieGameDev for additional tutorials. https://www.youtube.com/@achie_game_dev
Nerdy Teachers for EVEN MORE resources and tutorials (and just a cute website) https://nerdyteachers.com/PICO-8/
And, of course, zep and his PICO-8 philosophy for making this entirely possible.
I liked the particle effects and the game difficulty is good enough to make the game fun and challenging. Keep up the good work!
This is my favorite type of shooting.
The enemy gradients are beautiful!
thank you! i had a lot of fun designing the enemies, ESPECIALLY the final boss. The limitations of the PICO8 palette really helped with learning sprite art and doing "less is more."
This was more fun than I expected from such a game.
It's really addictive. Well done!
This is great. Nice changes from the LD tutorial and fine to stay close to the design. I like your idea on a hell and heaven mode .. one to put in the bag.
I didn't read the page first and was confused about lvl3 bomb thinking it was a flash kill/dmg everything on screen -- the shot is quite fast.
Very generous with the bombs/upgrades which I really liked .. just using them at 1 2 and 3 .. very cool.
Particle efects are really refined and I think your colours used are great.
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