Vacuum Invaders

This is a game for a custom game console that I'm making, called µGame (details at https://hackaday.io/project/27629). It's written in MicroPython and uses a tile-and-sprites library that I wrote.


I really wanted to make a space shooter, so I just rolled with the Space Invaders clone. But how to accommodate the theme? Well, in Space Invaders the more aliens you have in a row, the worse it is, since they advance faster. But that somehow didn't feel good enough, so I tried something more. In the original Space Invaders you could only have one missile on the screen at a time — if you missed, you had to wait for it to travel to the edge of the screen before you could shoot again. That encouraged more careful aiming. But what if you could shoot a second time, but the more you have missiles on the screen, the worse it is in terms of fire power? So the second missile you shoot is much smaller, and the third is simply embarrassingly tiny. Turns out that this doesn't affect the game much, though.

As you can hear, there are hardware problems with sound on my console right now. The sound circuit is just under the player's fingers, and touching it gives you nasty warbling and clicks. Plus there are a lot of clicks from the way the wav files are being played. I will need to fix that in the future versions somehow — move the circuit to a different place of the board, maybe add some shielding, we will see.

Finally, I know it sucks that you can't play the game yourself to rate it. I wanted to provide an emulator, so that you can at least play it on your computer, but it turned out to be harder to make than anticipated and it's not ready yet. If you *really* want, you can build a similar console yourself from stock modules (there are instructions on the project's page), but of course I can't expect everyone to do this. So there is the video: (https://youtu.be/fCqvTueoG7I). Sorry.