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Cart #32425 | 2016-11-13 | Code ▽ | Embed ▽ | License: CC4-BY-NC-SA
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How far can you make it inside bullet cave?

1) Don't let enemies pass you or spikes will grow from behind
2) Shooting (Z) enemies grows the cave; avoid the walls
3) Use your freeze power (X) to invert enemies and make the cave shrink
4) Collect power-ups to change your weapon and gain freeze power

Can you unlock all 20 items? 10 themes and 10 character ships available

Featuring...

Plays great on the PocketCHIP too, just search for "bullet cave" in Splore.

Please report any bugs in a reply or message @morningtoast on Twitter.

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This was supposed to be a "small" side project but it turned out to be anything but. It's still a simple game but this thing dragged on much longer than I anticipated. But I'm happy with the result...it's a good challenge.

Big thanks to Brian Follick for once again making some original music for one of my games. It'll get stuck in your head (blame him, not me).

And more thanks to the folks that stepped up to the call on Twitter and shared their ship design sprites...it was so much fun seeing how much fun you have with 8x8 pixels. I couldn't include all the submissions into the game this time around but maybe in a future update, we'll see.

Really cool game! The art is clean and the game has intresting mechanics!

One minor complaint is that enemies are not "enemy like/ship like", I find myself dodging power up In fear it is a enemy:D Maybe add a "fin", to them to make it look more like a ship.



It's good looking game despite (or because of) the minimalism , and the range of guns is great but man the shot enemies narrowing the cave mechanic is a little janky.
Maybe if enemies couldn't pass through the cave growth? There's very little you can do about them when they are flying there and it just spirals rapidly into a game over.

Thanks for the feedback.

I did go back and fourth with enemy ships but ultimately settled on a very generic sprite because I needed one that was a "grow" and one that was "shrink" that could easily be seen.

Your bullets can go through the walls too, so you should be able to always get them (depending on your gun, I guess). That's also part of the challenge is choosing which gun you like/need for the situation.

And the bad guys should not create spikes if they were previously in a wall just prior to them hitting the back line. It felt cheap to let an enemy that was behind you and in wall be a penalty, so that shouldn't happen too often - although it can happen if the timing is right and that does feel kind of shady but you can usually recover pretty quick.

As I was test playing, my average distance traveled before it go too bad was usually around 400...so each play is pretty quick, then you just have to repeat to keep adding to your total to unlock things.

Just don't forget to use X to invert the enemies so they reverse the cave growth! Using it at the right time is the key to going far.

I like it, the risk-reward mechanics are really interesting and it takes some time to figure out how to best utilize them. Really simple and clean yet readable style and good music as well.

If there's one suggestion I have it's for some more enemy variety, not necessarily more enemy types as much as some variety in terms movement speed and movement patterns. I understand it might be outside of the scope of the small project this was supposed to be but staggering in some new twists at set distances could have added that "I want to get better and see what's next!"-draw. The unlock system is a nice incentive, but it rewards grinding/playing a lot more than playing really well.

Good points, for sure. As you've found, there are only a few formations of baddies with varying quantity...it's very basic.

Having some new formations after a certain distance is a great idea and would be pretty easy to add in. Good point on the grinding

It was also on my "maybe" list to have a boss of some sort...really just a single enemy that floats in front, but I wasn't sure what to make him do. I felt like having him shoot bullets would be too much since the regular enemies don't fire at all.

Thanks for the feedback, all good stuff.



This game is really quite a feat, right now I'm working on a horizontal shooter and I'm drowning in my own mess. The code in this game is extremely clean and clear, brilliant for understanding how the game works. It's going to be really useful for fixing up my own game. Thank you MorningToast!

I love the back and forth mechanic of this game! Played this straight until I got to the "Colby" unlock. Great stuff! The only track is awesome/catchy but maybe have some different music tracks as unlocks?



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