New York City is being overrun by ghosts! Who you gonna call?
Take control of your favorite Ghostbuster and try to stop the onslaught of Slimers through 5 frantic levels of arcade action. Choose from Peter, Ray, Egon, or Winston and try to stop Gozer and her minions from taking over the world. Good luck!
Keyboard controls:
- Use Z to fire your proton beam
- Use X to throw a trap
- Up/Down arrows switch levels
Stop the Slimers from reaching the city. Use your proton beam to bust ghosts and destroy the portals. Your slime meter will fill as ghosts get by you. If your slime meter gets full, it's game over. And watch out...you don't want your proton pack to overheat!
You have ghost traps but they're limited and you can only throw one at a time. And keep an eye out for the Stay Puft marshmallow man...he means the city is almost filled with slime.
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Updated 10/2021:
To celebrate the new upcoming Ghostbusters movie, the game has been tweaked a bit to add Gozer to the script as well as setting default play to the original Ghostbusters characters. You can still switch to the girl Ghostbusters by hitting Up/Down on the title screen.
Ghost traps are no longer unlimited! You start with 3 traps and can earn more as you bust more ghosts. Keep an eye out for the orange Slimers...bust him and you'll get an extra trap.
About this game:
My 5-year-old daughter loves Ghostbusters and while she's not really into video games just yet, I decided to make her a Ghostbusters game to maybe nudge her along a little bit. She's seen all the movies but likes the new Ghostbusters the most, so this game features the lady Ghostbusters...but don't worry, you can unlock Peter and the gang...just keep bustin'!
All in all, it's a simple game...basically Tapper with Ghostbusters. It's not that difficult but I pretty much made with my kid in mind. It'll be a tough challenge for her but for us "experienced" gamers it'll be a fun but brief playthrough.
Feedback and bug reports are welcome and encouraged. Thanks to everyone that helped in development. Brian Follick for turning the Ghostbusters theme into a Pico-8 track. @BeetleInTheBox for the extra graphics in short notice. And the great Pico-8 community for the support, snippets and encouragement to actually finish a game...thanks!
I love it! Room permitting, Maybe have the other ghostbusters (Animated & original) as unlockables? :D
Pretty cool stuff!
Beat the game, chose an original character, beat it, got a runtime error.
@Vectorguy - Thanks for the report, I'll take a look. Sorry for the error. Glad you had fun up until that point :)
Thanks for the report, I'll take a look.
Sure thing; thanks for the game!
Sorry for the error.
Not a big deal, these things happen.
Glad you had fun up until that point :)
Definitely! Takes several games before you can figure out how to continue on and then possibly beat it. Nice take on Tapper!
Updated to 1.1 to fix the bug reported in the end credits after unlocking. Hopefully all well now.
I am enjoying this.
One Question : Is there a way to tell if the trap is about to close? Is there a tell or do we just have to time it?
Thanks for playing.
There's no visual tell for trap closing. You'll just have to "feel" the timing, which I've found happens pretty quick after you play a few times.
Although...you have me thinking if maybe it would be better to have the trap sound effect happen when the trap closes and is done...? So as an alert cue in case you're focusing somewhere else on the board. Hmmmm...
Fun. Gonna have to bring the pocketchip to work for lunchtime breaks. I love the colors. I always enjoy your games anyways. They definitely have a certain arcade'y feel to them.
Great game! I like managing the traps and the gun. Beat it.
When you switch levels, your overheat guage snaps to zero. This means you can unload all the way to overheat on one level, then just change levels and fire away again. Was this by design?
Thanks for playing, glad you enjoyed it.
Yes, that was by design. The overheat meter goes down by itself pretty rapidly but I like that switching lanes reset things...it kept things moving along quicker.
Love this! Not too easy too complete, though! Or maybe I just suck. Very well balanced!
Thanks, gtust. Glad you played and had fun...and glad it's a good challenge.
Once you beat the game once, you'll unlock the classic Ghostbusters as character options. Egon, Peter, Ray and Winston...all your favorites!
You start the game with Holtzmann, why would you ever need anyone else?
Really liking the game loop here. Feels very satisfying trying to balance between blasting different ghosts and trying to avoid overheating. One thing that might make the game feel even more juicier is to add a small maybe even 1 frame animation to the character as he/she changes the platform. Make the character squash a little before he makes the jump, to make it feel more organic and juicier. You could maybe even add the same animation as he lands. It's worth trying out! Cheers.
Good idea! I'll have to see how to try and do that. Just a quick sprite scaling might do the trick.
Thanks for playing and happy you've been enjoying it.
And for what it's worth, I made a gamedev journal for Bustin' using Twitter moments. Kinda fun to look back and see how the game progressed.
The music in this is perfect! I hope to be able to make PICO-8 music like this one day. I'll admit, I've loaded this cart a few times just to let the music play. ;)
The gameplay is excellent, too. As others have pointed out, it's just the right amount of difficulty. Great work!
Thanks. The music is all thanks to @gnarcade_vgm who has created the music for most of my carts. I don't have the patience to figure out honest music with the tracker. I'll stick to ideas and shoddy programming :)
To celebrate Halloween and the upcoming Ghostbusters movie, I updated Bustin' a smidge.
I added Gozer to the script and the default characters are now the original guys. You can still play as the girl Ghostbusters by hitting up/down/ on the title screen. Just changes the sprites.
Tweaked gameplay a tiny bit by making ghost traps limited. You start with 3 but can earn more as you bust ghosts...just look for the orange Slimers!
I hadn't played this game for a few years and I was happy (and somewhat surprised) to find it's still fun to play. It does have a sweet spot of kinda-challenging-but-not-too-hard play. Given I made this for my kid, who is now 9, and she finds is not too boring is a good sign.
"Bustin' makes me feel good !"
Excellent. Challenging. Don't forget to shoot the gates !
Gold star work.
This is cool. If it had an update, I'd make it possible to move while laser-ing since that would be the main thing to trip me up. Nice job!
Fun game. Graphics remind me of Ghostbusters II on Game Boy, which I loved back in the day. It took me a while to realize I have to shoot the portals down; I wasted my time blasting Slimers forever.
One feedback I have is to kindly add more music. Having to hear the theme song over and over again drives me insane.
Really nice presentation the title screen is great.
One thing I noticed is changing lane seems to reset the overheat counter, is that a deliberate decision?
I don't remember if the heat reset was a conscience decision when I was making the game...it probably wasn't because I usually don't plan that far ahead, lol! But it was something I chose to keep in there when it was first released. I don't have a good reason why other than it probably didn't bother me all that much and the game is often frantic enough even with the reset.
But having it not reset would certainly add a little extra challenge. I keep running lists of ideas/add-ons for my games so I'll certainly add that to the Bustin' list.
Thanks for playing and giving some feedback, I appreciate it.
Shameless plug for Bustin' as we have a new Ghostbusters movie coming out this week. Frozen Empire looks pretty rad! Maybe it'll be enough motivation for me to make a sequel, ha!
Thanks to everyone that plays this game and enjoys it. Keep on bustin'
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