Gravity Blade

"Take Flight - Gravity Blade!"

"Eliminate enemy forces who have forcibly mined away your planet's energy crystals to use against you! Using Gravity Blade's powerful Graviton Generator, fire particle beams, capture enemies and siphon their power using a Graviton Snare, and charge up energy to release captured enemies in a wide barrage of junk with the Graviton Launcher!

Wipe them out, collect crystals, and save your world!

- - - KNOWN ISSUES - - -

- Win64 build crashes if you lose all lives. Use Win32 for now.

- - - CONTROLS - - -

Keyboard controls only for now due to time constraints:
* X (tap): Fire Particle Beam
* C (tap): Fire Graviton Snare at weakened (flashing) enemies to capture them and power up / fill your Graviton Loop gauge
* X (hold & release): Charge up a powerful junk shot with the Graviton Launcher. Kills with these projectiles drop better crystals, but power down your Particle Beam!

- - - ABOUT - - -

Gravity Blade is a scrolling shoot-em-up inspired by many classics of the genre, such as *Gradius*, *Axelay*, *R-Type*, and so on. We decided to interpret the theme "Caught in a Loop" a little differently by having the player use the ship's Graviton Generator to capture weakened enemies within a Graviton Loop. This uses enemy energy to power up the player's own weapons.

The player can either decide to keep their upgraded weapons, or to hold fire to charge up the Graviton Launcher. Upon release, the player will fire a wave of captured enemies as junk, which deals high damage and grants better loot on kills, but also powers the player's Particle Beam weapon back down again. This allows for a gameplay loop of fighting, capturing, powering up, releasing, collecting higher points, and repeating!

This is a project we both got really into, and will likely continue pursuing after the fact - both being big fans of the genre, this prompt was a great kick into gear to get started on something that could shape up to be extra cool!