its a simple game
i like it
Author Comments
The music and Yufo's ship design were made by @tinymeatsupreme
I made this game a while back for the Opera GX Game Jam. Since then, I've made a few improvements, and now I think I can post the game here! I had many more visual improvements I wanted to make, but I lost motivation.
This game is basically Breakout but within a vertical shmup! You control Yufo, the lovable UFO, who must climb a seemingly endless vertical shaft with his friend Comette. Yufo is defenseless on his own, but he can guide Comette around the playing field. Comette destroys any hazards in her path.
Use the arrow keys to move Yufo. That's it! Simple as that.
You can also press escape to pause.
This game has a fair amount of polish in the graphics, sound, & mechanics—simple as they are, they're all nice—but there are a few things that could be improved imo.
First, I think a bit too much of the difficulty comes from the color of the projectiles being rather close to the bg color. Although the pale center makes them visible, the outer coat that actually hits you can be easy to miss. I think inverting those colors would make more sense (i.e. pale outer shell, dark inside).
Secondly, the difficulty stops ramping up pretty early on. Once you've seen your first group of 5-6 turrets plus target on screen, that's as tough as it seems to get. I played to a high score of just over 19000, and it actually seemed to get easier as it went along, with fewer turrets all at once. A simple solution would be to progressively speed up the entire game as you get further into it, forcing you to react more quickly. Note that should include the player's speed as well.
Lastly, the game is pretty repetitive. This sort of game could use various (temporary) powerups dropping at random for the player to collect; that would break up the monotony a bit.
Note that these are just suggestions, there are other ways you could introduce more difficulty/variation into the game.
Kilomatter responds:
Whoa that's a very high score, I only ever got to around 5000, if memory serves. (It's really hard to keep track when there's been so many different versions of the game during development)
I wanted to make the game get faster, but because the game generates itself one tile at a time, you can only move at speeds divisible by 16. Otherwise you get gaps in the tiles. There's no nice way of making it gradually get faster in the current code.
I originally wanted to make the game like Downwell, where there's multiple rooms and an end, but didn't get that in the initial version due to time constraints. I could probably get that working now though, it'd just require heavy editing of the current code. It would break up the repetitiveness and allow for gradual speed increases though!
The game also originally had a palette like Downwell and there the bullet was easier to see. I changed the palette cause I wanted to be original, and was also planning to add multiple palettes but never did.
I might come back to this game and add changes to make it less repetitive, but I also kinda wanna make new stuff. I want to make a simple game to test how high-res graphics work in GameMaker.
Thanks for your feedback!
I came to this game through the song that was used. So I didn't know what to expect. First off the controls. A little stiff, but not unbearable. In terms of the game itself, the actionized version of breakout does offer some uniqueness. As well as creativity. Considering most people when they see this they assume space shooter and wouldn't think to use that ball as a weapon. So this stands out very well.
