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Star Fighter Pico 8

Lift off to the space in this retro shooting game, fight 20 brunches of aliens (not food), and make your way to the victory.
Get 20 candies from defeated aliens to charge your special weapon: the waveshot. Once your special weapon is ready (when you get the message "special ok"), you can fire the waveshot to melt your enemies and their bullets, or you can keep collecting more candies for extra shields or bonus points.

Controls

Title, game clear or game over screen

Al you need to do is press the Z/C key (O button) or the X key (X button) to move across the menus.

Main game

keyboard / gamepad
Arrow keys / d-pad = movement
X key / X button = fire (hold the key/button for auto-fire)
Z or C key / O button = waveshot (if "special ok")

Gameplay

The goal or the game is clear 20 waves called brunches. Each brunch includes a formation of aliens.
Fire your main shot by pressing and holding the X key / X button.
Once the alien formation is completely destroyed, you will advance to the next brunch.
Don't get hit by aliens or by their bullets, or you will take damage.
You only have four shields, and each time you get hit (damage), you will lose one. If you run out shields, it's game over.
Aliens have a chance of 1/2 (an half) to drop candies when defeated, but they will always drop candies if you take them while they are descending from their normal formation.
Each collected candy will make you invisible temporarily.
Once you get 20 candies, you can fire the special weapon by pressing the Z or C key / O button. Or can keep collecting surplus candies to recover shields and get bonus points (if you have all the 4 shields).
In the upper part of the screen, there are two counters for your special waveshot (blue) and your surplus candies (yellow) respectively. The left and right corners of the screen also have lines representing the charge of both counters (normally blue, or yellow if "special ok")
There is powerful foe awaiting in the brunch 20.

A word from the developer.

This is my first videogame ever finished in Pico 8. Made while watching the YouTube shmup tutorial series of Lazy Devs Academy. I didn't tried to create a too different game from the tutorial series (Cherry Bomb), but I focused on modifying the game difficulty and my own unique elements, like the waveshot (that I originally created while doing an experiment on the main shot sprite count).

One main addition that I am proud of was the inclusion of user interface elements to show to the player the mount of items required to use the special weapon, and when the player becomes invisible under some circumstances. Originally I only implemented the upper screen counters, but these alone do not illustrate well how much items the player requires to use the special weapon. To fix this, I added extra lines in the corners to represent the special weapon and surplus items counters in a more notable way.

I took inspiration by the videogame re-releases M2 ShotTringers, where most of their games have multiple user interface elements on the screen to show information to the player.

Other small additions in my game where the mount of waves and enemies, but those are just extra stuff I wanted to add.

The soundtrack was inspired by the main musical theme of the game Space Invaders Infinity Gene. I tried to replicate half of the original soundtrack, to later split it in two parts (one for the title screen and another for the boss fight). The intro track was inspired by the game Galaxian. The game clear track is a fragment of Ode to joy because I really like that song.

The entire project was very satisfying to me in general, even if this is a very small game.
If someone finds bugs in the game, or wants to comment about the game, write your messages on this BBS.