Cobolt (Patreon)

I'm finally releasing my game! Game files for PC, Mac and Linux are attached to this post. Instructions on how to play are in the graphics above.

I'd really love to know what you think if you play it. Please leave a comment!

Background

This project fulfills a childhood dream of mine: to make a shoot 'em up spaceship game. I started one when I was about 10 years old in QBasic. Of course I never got it to work. Although hilariously, the one thing I did do was a lot of was the graphics. I made the menus too and wrote a story for it. I just couldn't figure out how to make the actual game. Plus it was in QBasic, so it would've been horrendously slow anyway.

Obviously I never went into game dev or programming and my life took a completely different turn. So it's really exciting to be able to revisit a project like this after all these years and actually finish it! I honestly never thought I'd get this far.

Design

The game uses a mechanic that I don't think I've seen in a shmup before (although I haven't played all that many of them so I'd be surprised if it doesn't exist somewhere) and I wanted to try making it. I'm really bad at Nintendo-hard shumps that kill you after a single hit (or sometimes in 2 hits, where the first one causes you to lose all your powerups) and I don't like them very much. After thinking about this for a while, I thought it might be interesting to create a system where your weapons are charged from absorbing the energy from enemy weapons, so you have to run into a certain number of enemy bullets—but not too many because then your ship overheats and explodes. It's a really interesting balancing act that I think is pretty fun. And it's a bit counterintuitive because if you play a lot of shmups, your first instinct is to avoid all bullets. But here, it leaves you unable to shoot for a few moments.

This game was made in Pico-8, a 'fantasy console' which exists with a lot of limitations similar to a classic 8-bit console. Because of these limitations, the game itself is only about 2 minutes long if you play it straight through. (It could be longer, but I don't really have the programming ability to make it work. At this point I'd have to rewrite it from scratch.) Depending how good you are at shmups, it'll probably take about 15 minutes to beat. Yes, there are entire minutes of fun!

But those limitations do offer one big help which is: they limit the scope of the game so that you can actually get it done. That's even more important for someone like me who had to learn Lua (the language Pico-8 uses) from scratch. Lua is really easy though fortunately. So even if it is a pretty short game, I finished it, which means a lot to me.

Shout Out

I also have to give a shout out to Krystian and his Lazy Devs Academy YouTube channel, which gave me nearly everything I needed to make this game. His tutorials were invaluable. I borrowed a lot of ideas but I also tried to do things in my own way so nothing is a direct copy. (Except for Split2D(). No idea how that one works.) If you have any interest in trying something like this or learning Pico8, definitely check him out.