4 GIGA BOSS FIGHTS
Objective
Fight your way through an onslaught of more than 4 billion consecutive boss fights in top-down shooting arcade action madness. Dodge bullet-hell as your ship automatically shoots the core of the enemy.
Controls
- d-pad/arrow keys: move your ship around
- mouse/touch: swipe to navigate menus, steer ship with relative mouse hold movements
- [z] or [x]: ​spend your power-bar for 3-way shooting extra fire power (2x power when bar is below 50%, 4x when above 50%)
- controller pad recommended.
Features
- More than 4 billion bosses
- 22 unlockable player ships
- gazillions of bullets
- a few lasers!
- 3 game modes: normal, attract and permadeath
- auto game save persistence between sessions (quit the game anytime)
As usual, please share your thoughts, comments and bug reports below. I truly appreciate everyone's feedback.
Also a big shout-out to my #pico8 bros on twitter for giving great ideas and suggestions as I was developing this one. You guys are awesome!
Updates
Jun 28,2019:
- Fill up your power-bar as you damage the enemy, press <z> or <x> to spend your power in 2x damage 3-way power shots.
- If your power-bar is above 50%, your power is now 4x for maximum boss obliteration.
Feb 11,2019:
- Bosses now have Lovecraftian names!
Feb 9,2019:
- Optimized a bit (if things get out of hand stop spawning background particles)
- This means more bullets, harder game... git gud
- Increased the play area a little bit
- Less inertia on the ship's movement
- Shows the number of tries (game overs) on normal mode
Feb 5,2019:
- Fix a permadeath persistence bug
- Added touch/mouse support
This is awesome. So stylish and super polished. Even just in the menu I can tell how much work you put into it. And it's fun to boot!
Awesome game! How about giving the boss randomly generated names?
Edit: each name is unique, so there are multiple syllables (one to four), to ensure this
Thanks for the feedback, guys!
@Ikura: I thought about it early on, using Lovecraft-influenced syllables to generate the names, but I decided to put it under the "if there's still tokens left" bucket.
I might give it a go if I can free up some tokens after I finish implementing mouse support for touch devices.
gasp Amazing that you had my idea in mind the whole time! Hope you free up some tokens! Maybe shorten the variable names?
Shortening var names helps with the compressed size (also a big problem, but a bit easier than token count).
For token count there's: finding dead code, caching values, declaring vars together, representing tables as strings, etc... truly an art on itself (but very annoying nonetheless).
@Ikura: do you mean the circle in their center core? It could be interpreted as its mouth or its eye, or maybe both (because, you know, cosmic horrors and all that :)
Nice shmup - I was a little put off by the "nudge rotation" when moving the player, but that's an unique gameplay.
However, WHY NOT 60FPS??? The game screams for ultrasmooth bullet move!!
@freds72: It all started as an experiment in "steering" your shooting in a top-down shooter. That's effectively the first mechanic I tried with this game... wanted to be something different than your standard top-down shmup :D
And believe me, I'm with you on the whole 60 fps thing, I tried it many times but I had to sacrifice too many bullets in the process so I decided to release it at 30.
30 fps is probably the best anyone making a game on here can do. limited memory just makes it more authentic.
yeah, I also have a bunch running at 60 (Friendly Dungeon, Slime Bubble Bro, skulldude, Run-Gun-Bot)... but they're not as intense in the bullet-hell department.
Can't promise anything, but I might try to upgrade it to 60FPS in the near future.
challenge_accepted.png
Amazing! Stunning! Exciting!
Aaaaaand I'm dead. Boss #51. So. Many. Lil. Dots.
@nonymousFog: not entirely sure what you mean, but you can steer the ship with the arrow keys (or d-pad on a controller) or touching and dragging on touch devices... but I would definitely recommend using a gamepad controller if available.
I has question:
How does one acquire such a device known as "Gamepad?"
I can click and drag the ship, but it doesn't seem to fly straight towards the mouse, going too far to the left or right. The best way I've found is to use the mouse and arrow keys at once, but it's tricky.
This is my favorite gamepad (if you're on a PC or a raspberry pi):
https://smile.amazon.com/Buffalo-iBuffalo-Classic-USB-Gamepad/dp/B002B9XB0E
As for using both the arrow keys and mouse at the same time, it really wasn't meant to be played like that... I would just use the arrow keys alone.
I cheated and got to the final boss
Edit: I'm sorry for cheating
I used to love playing Warning Forever. This compares very favourably. :D
It reminded me of Warning Forever as well.
Love the game, really cool style! 😊
Great style and interesting controls. Hit detection is spot on and threats are obvious. The stylish visuals don't detract from visibility at all. I usually have difficulty with bullet-hell shooters, as classic 8-way shmup movement feels at odds with the "thread the needle" gameplay and I just never got coordinated enough to make it work for me. I have no such issue with this movement system. Every bullet death feels 100% earned.
Lasers deaths occasionally felt less so, like they were operating a bit faster than the rest of the game. I like that they can force difficult decisions by significantly limiting your evasion routes. But they also make your ships movement go from feeling precise to sluggish when you're failing to out run one. My tactic for these quickly became: "figure out where the worst lasers are coming from; spread-shot that body part down ASAP". Part of me wishes I could spend spread meter on a speed boost instead. I'm not 100% committed to this opinion though and it could just be a "git gud" thing.
On the whole, very cool game that would be fun to see expanded into a stand-alone product.
I love bullet hell games, but I'm finding it quite easy to exploit the bullet pattern on this one. This is my first time ever playing this; so I haven't practiced it or tried to "git gud" or anything. I took the default ship, I keep the ship at the bottom in the center and... that's basically all I need to do to defeat bosses. I'm up to boss 24 right now, I didn't even know about the mega-shot. Sitting in the bottom-center of the screen, I find the spread pattern of the bullets is such that they pretty much avoid me most of the time. It cuts close at times, but it's mostly the case. I only tap the arrow keys to adjust the aim of my shot or occasionally have to move out of the way of the slow bullets. Then I move right back to bottom-center and sometimes don't have to move at all. Just let the ship auto-fire its way to victory after victory.
.jpeg)
this is great! i played this for way too long and i love it. its an infinite bullet hell
in case you didn't know what Lovecraftian is:
Lovecraftian (comparative more Lovecraftian, superlative most Lovecraftian) Frighteningly monstrous and otherworldly, sometimes with terrifyingly unnatural anatomy. Of, pertaining to, or emulating the style or works of author H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937).
i just googled it
[Please log in to post a comment]
