Space Inflators

In this NES-styled top-down shooter, you control a ship sent on a mission to destroy a group of dangerous inflating aliens, who threaten to inflate the earth until it explodes. Will you manage to explode them first?

This game was originally made for the GMTK Game Jam 2024 under 96 hours. This is the first time I ever participated in a game jam. Despite the game's scope being small, It was still very stressful to make on a time limit, but I managed to make the game adhere to (most of) my vision in the end. I learned a lot from this experience and I'm very happy I participated in the jam!

Controls

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WASD - Move the ship

Arrow Keys - Shoot laser in each direction (hold for auto-fire)

P - Pause

Game Rules

The game includes 4 levels, in which your main goal is to destroy all the aliens on screen. If you touch one of the aliens or one of their bullets, your ship will crash and the level will restart.  

To destroy the aliens, you can attack them with your lazer, but beware! As you attack an alien, it will start to inflate! When an alien inflates, it becomes bigger, stronger and its attacks might become harder to dodge. Every alien has 3 levels of inflation, starting at the first level and increasing as their health decreases. When an alien's health reaches 0, they will be destroyed.

When an alien gets destroyed, The score number in the Top-Left corner of the screen will increase. Every alien kind has it's own baseline score value, but if you want to challenge yourself to get a higher score, you can take advantage of the multi number at the top-right corner of the screen. Every time an alien gets inflated, the multi number will increase by 1, and when an alien is destroyed, the multi number will decrease by 2 and the score you get will be multiplied by the multi number. Therefore, if you target the aliens one-by-one, you'll get the baseline score from each of them, but if you keep some of them inflated and destroy each one afterwards, the score you get will be higher. This mechanic encourages the player to challenge himself to deal with multiple inflated aliens at the same time to get a higher score.

The inflation mechanic, which plays the biggest role in this game's design, is what makes this game fit the theme of the GMTK jam 2024, "Built To Scale".

Score BaseLines

Farg (Blue Frog) - 150

Squido (Green Squid) - 300

Magma (Red Demon) - 450

Music and Font Asset Sources

Title Theme - "8 Bit Nostalgia" by David Renda

Main Font - Arcade Classic Font by Jakob "Pizzadude" Fischer (only on Windows build)

Title Font - FFF Forward Font by "Fonts For Flash"