It's a side-scrolling shooter. Set in a cave. There's no story.
Arrow keys move. X shoots.
The game was programmed in Actionscript using the Flixel API and the free FlashDevelop IDE. The graphics were all painstakingly, maladroitly hand-pixeled in GraphicsGale. Sound effects courtesy of DrPetter's amazing sfxr, converted to mp3 using Audacity. The background track was made in Modplug tracker, using some 8-bit instruments.
There are five basic entities: poorly-drawn gems, stalactites, stalagmites, ants, and bats.
Collect gems for points.
Stalactites can be shot down. If one falls on an ant or a bat, you get extra points. When it lands, the cavern shakes, and may dislodge other stalactites.
Stalagmites are merely obstacles.
Ants rest on the ground. They fire multiple non-homing shots in the air. As the game progresses, they fire more shots faster and with greater frequency. Ants can be killed with sustained fire.
Bats rest on the ceiling. If you fire a shot while one is onscreen, it will swoop down and charge to the left side of the screen. Bats get faster as the game progresses, but still will never attack unless provoked. Bats can be killed, although it's usually better to avoid them.
Score: Stalactite/Stalagmite: 1 pt. Ant/Bat: 50 pts. Gem: 100 pts. Crushing an enemy with a Stalactite: 250 pts.
If the bullets would actually be useful it'd be a real shooter :) Shooting stalagmites is pretty useless since you can't see anything when the screen shakes. And the ants take way too much shots. Managed 1302 points. Good music!
Pretty basic shmup. Plays well, nothing too inspiring, but it moves nice and fast. The 'smash enemy with stalactite' mechanic is pretty neat, though I rarely got a chance to use it.
Ok, it is harder than my game, now I learned a lesson, to do not make a hard game for ludum dare, because people has a lot of games to review and do not have enought time to become a master of one game.
Like the music. Funny though, the game feels more difficult when firing. Easier (at least for as far as I got) to just concentrate on flying into things. Think the controls where a bit too sensitive, didn't get any kind of precision.
Pretty fun, though I'm not sure if it's a shmup as shooting seems to mostly not be worth the trouble. Maybe it's just a mup! I like the way the music changes after the level transition, though I didn't notice it changing after the first.
Feels really solid, despite it's simplicity. I liked being able to shoot the spikes, but the quake effect after the fell was so extreme that it kind of nulled out the usefulness of it.
Pretty fun. I wish the difficulty increased faster though, level 1 is pretty easy and going through it again each time you die gets boring. It could use a button for focused movement too as almost all of my deaths came from crashing into walls while trying to get the gems near them.
Controls were challenging to me so I only was able to ever make it to Level 2 / 800 points high. Found the screen shaking a little bit too much as it was way too disorienting. Like the graphic palette and the variety of creatures and cave objects. I wish I could control the ship a little better to get to some of those toughly placed hearts. Solid little arcadey game though and fun for a few go rounds for sure. Love the music too!
If the bullets would actually be useful it'd be a real shooter :)
Shooting stalagmites is pretty useless since you can't see anything when the screen shakes. And the ants take way too much shots. Managed 1302 points.
Good music!