How to Play
The First Gloopadoop Invasion is a retro arcade style shoot-em-up. You need to shoot the Gloopadoops and survive at least 10 waves and defeat the mastermind boss at the end.
- Arrow keys move the ship - or you can use a controller
- Z or N or C - Shoot your T72 flame cannon!
- X or M or V - Shoot your AIM-21 "Shatterer" Missile - you have maximum of 5 and they regenerate
NOTE: you can use a gamepad or controller also. Please do!
If you get hit by an enemy or a bullet you will lose health. You have 5 health pips - dont lose them all!
If all enemies are destroyed or have left the screen the next wave will start. There are 10 waves and then . . . well you will see.
There is an Easy Mode if you are finding it difficult - keep trying the normal mode to improve your payback.
Easy Mode will make enemies fire and attack less and the boss attacks more forgiving.
Pickups, Missiles and Surprises
You will occasionally get pickups floating down to you - This is Metal - It will heal one health pip - Metal Up! - and also immediately generate a Missile for you to fire.
Your powerful prototype Earthship X36 can regenerate missiles roughly every 10 seconds - but you can only carry 5 missiles at a time as indicated at the bottom right - Fire a missile to do massive area effect damage!
One wave you encounter may be a TIME VORTEX level - spinning you into the warp and slowing time. You will need to dodge slower bullets and move slower - Slower might seem easier but .. we will see .. we will see ..
How to get Payback
You need to deal as much payback (score) as possible to the invading Gloopadoops - this is how you can do that:
- Missiles do a lot of damage and are the best payback really..
- Splatter attacking enemies for an double payback
- Killing tougher Gloopadoops will greater payback.
- Do as much damage as possible in a second to get extra DMG bonus payback depending on how much damage per second you did - missiles will be necessary for this
Your maximum payback will save - try to beat it again and again!
How I developed this game
I just wanted to share some thoughts on what I wanted to achieve with this game.
- This game was obviously heavily based on the basic shmup tutorial series from Krystman as credited below
- I wanted this game to feel more visceral and fun to shoot and fly the ship. I think the added gore really helps with that.
- I really wanted to emphasis the second weapon - missile - as a always available strategic weapon to help clear enemies as opposed to a more traditional "oh no!" weapon to clear bullets and save a bad situation.
- I thought the time vortex level added a bit of interesting difference to runs and sometimes they were easier and sometimes harder - the idea really came from a tutorial episode where Krystman emphasized slower bullets were sometimes more dangerous.
- I really wanted a different boss from the tutorial and it was a struggle but I think its an ok boss design -- I did persist with a weird use of SIN in the boss movements.. probably to an extreme really and I can see that really this is not really worth it.
- I had many ideas during the tutorial and am hopping to explore them in a sequel
Credits
This game, art, sounds and weird music was put together by TheGacko (me) - my first game - Credit also goes to my daughter Cosima for naming the aliens!
All code was hugely helped by the work of Krystian Majewski aka Krystman on Cherry Bomb as part of the Lazy Devs Shmup Tutorial on YouTube.
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