Bars Attack from Outer Space

My entry for the weekly game jam by the name of Trijam – theme: “Loading Process.”

A classic space shooter (the hello-world of game tutorials?!), but in this case with just a single enemy: an autonomous missile-discharging progress bar. Every collision with one of your bullets shortens the bar, thus makes it harder to hit, shortens the missiles, while also speeding up the production.

It turned out rather addictive (as in to me… personally me) and you should definitely give it a try, rate it very good, and tell all your friends that they are missing out when not following your example closely. I can not command you to rate it 5 stars in every category but I can try to beg and I can definitely sob.

P.S.: I’m sorry for imposing that Windows-only thing – I think for the next jam I bite the bullet and upgrade to the HTML5-export tier of GameMaker (or should I go PICO-8 right away? It looks fun for sure). Of course, I myself prefer playing and play-testing the entries that are playable right away in the browser. Downloading some EXE that someone made (especially someone going by the shady name of CLAPOSTROPHE) is some leap-of-faith heavy-weight. For everyone (too hesitant) I’d suggest the following:

1. Before executing, upload it to the Google sevice VirusTotal. It virus-tests that bugger with dozens and dozens of scanners.
2. To be extra-extra safe, execute it in a Sandbox (check Sandboxie, a while ago it turned OpenSource).

All other platform users: sorry to you too.

THEME

Theme of Trijam #176 was “Loading Process.” In this short game one fights an autonomous loading bar that is occupied with the tireless creation of missiles to launch into one’s spaceship direction (self defense, most probably). Further issues arise during combat, given the circumstance that the bar is directly connected to its “health” state and the size of the aforementioned missiles. It may sound weirder in written from, but it’s actually pretty intuitive when seen.

So yes, we battle a progress bar with feature-creep in space. This is my second game for a game jam and also my second game in total (unfinished text adventures be the exception). I hope it is enjoyed by at least some.

Now what makes the weekly Trijam so special (beside the weekly part) is this rule: only 3 hours in total for programming, creation of artwork, sounds, etc. Not timely constrained is everything else: gathering ideas, writing a design doc, setting up the page on itch.io and so on.

3 HOURS RULE

When I heard about Trijam the first time, I knew I had to try it out. It seemed great at motivating to do the right thing and dive first into a good solid planning phase, and that way un-burden the programming part. It turned out though that I was so curious about my “fighting a progress bar” idea, that soon I threw together a few lines in Game Maker. And I was so hooked by that simple mechanic I had thought about that a long convoluted messy phase would begin… were I mostly played the game (or what was at least play-ready) over and over… added a few lines here and there once in a while, made some cosmeticm changes, and so on. So the planning phase boiled down to applying a few initial scribbles to my notebook, and everything else was a wild ride were everything came together for me impossible to untangle.

Next time.

THE SPACESHIP CONTROLS

• Left/Right – Rotate accordingly
• Top/Bottom – Accelerate or deaccelerate
• Spacebar – Shoot a bullet

DOWNLOAD

Sorry, for only offering a Windows version. Would have loved to add a HTML5 version to play in the browser, but my particular Game Maker Studio subscription doesn’t offer that.