Updated to 1.01
Beware! Aliens have invaded earth! Of course - we are the aliens...
On behalf of High Commander XL'ARGH - you have been tasked to fetch the puny humans for our gruesome experiments etc. The mothership is too valuable to risk for close quarters operations. Therefore we dispatch you - our great minion T'URD with smaller crafts to capture specimens with your tractor beam and carry them upwards into thinner atmosphere so that they can be collected by the mothership. Beware that the ship will lose movement speed when you activate the tractor beam with holding down your big ACTION BUTTON. Good luck, and break a tentacle!
First Pico-8 cart - it has been really fun, but has taken way too long :P Love the limitations, even for code and LUA subset. Hope you enjoy it for some levels at least :)
Changes (1.01)
- Reduced number of levels in cycle as they were too simple, ramp up difficulty much faster
- Cycle BG each level
Hey, this is pretty great! Tons of nice little art touches; title screen is super charming, that semi-dithered sky with the per-level-group palette shifts and the subtle slow clouds is great, the tiny flailing earthlings are adorable and kind of perfect.
Sounds are nice too, and I like that you accounted for dropping little dudes and for collisions between them and bullets. (And feel slightly bad for dropping a dude to find out if I could. And started to feel like their protector once the earth jets showed up and started bombing the little dudes.)
Just really nice work all around. It's an awesome first cart.
My one major suggestion would be to essentially collapse your 3-level groups into single levels; as is, with a simple game mechanic the levels are pretty samey, and the escalation of difficulty is really sort of slow and sedate as a result. If every level had basically another ground cannon thing and another jet, the sense of arcade difficulty mounting would be a lot more urgent and I think the game would feel a little more gripping as a result.
I have to agree with joshmillard that the first 4 or 5 levels were very easy and basically the same level. In fact, until the plane is introduced you can complete a whole level without moving left and right because humans just run into your beam.
Other than that, amazing graphics and sound! The shades of the sky in the first section are great. I can see you paid a lot of attention to detail.
Thanks for the feedback, I adjusted the difficulty ramp-up based on your suggestion.
The background art is inspired by Cellusious - http://cellusious.deviantart.com He had a monthly art digest some time ago which I subscribed to.
Ha, this game is politically incorrect on an intergalactic level!
Was the makeup of this inspired by the Atari 2600 library? Because the colors in the sky remind me of something like Commando Raid, the humans like the guy trapped in the building in Fire Fighter and when you score points for capturing a human that reminds me of some game that I can't place. Granted, this could all be a coincidence but that stuff just reminds me of a few things, 2600-wise.
This game is hilarious and really fun.
I suggest making the lower limit of the UFO's movement the same Y value as where the bullets are created, so you can't hover below the turrets for safety. I also suggest making the projectiles a bit wider, so you can't hover between turrets for safety.
Best game I've played in a long while, great arcade game and funny stuff man! "Our great minion T'URD" Haha xD How many levels are there? I haven't got that far yet.
It's just so much more satisfying to hold the humans in front of their own guns or drop from a great height than score to score the points by laborious carrying them all the way to the top of the screen. I like how you can still pass the levels like that , getting an anti-high school.
Found I couldn't pay attention to or had the patience for the timing on the guns and just tried to dodge from point blank range which never worked.
Dunno if that patience and calculating was the desire central mechanic rather than a reflex thing?
Would of been fun to try and hold multiple people in the tractor beam at once at an increasing loss of speed.
It's a good concept though, I just didn't have the patience for it.
There was an old atari 2600 game called Cosmic Ark that this reminds me of, except for lacking the asteroid shooting sections.
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