My First Shmup

My First Shmup is an old-school style arcade shoot 'em up (shmup) aesthetically reminiscent of Galxian or Galaga, with hints of newer shmups sprinkled in.

How to play

Fly your fighter and defend the known universe by destroying the evil Space Ghost's armada.

Arrow keys - move your fighter
O/Z button - Fires Missiles, reduces ship speed
X button - Fires Plasma Weapon

System

Enemies destroyed with missiles drop energy cores at a rate of 20%. Pick up energy cores to increase your energy meter. The Plasma Weapon does more damage than missiles, but can only be fired when there is energy in the meter. Each Plasma shot depletes your meter a small amount.

When energy meter goes above 100% you gain a life, but your energy meter drops to 0%.

Scoring

Scoring is based on proximity; up to 5x the normal score value per destroyed ship. Bonus scoring does not apply to Plasma Weapon.

Change Log

V1.0

Initial release

V1.1

changed life indicator to show lives remaining after the current life
plasma shots cost 1 unit instead of 5 units on the meter
removed ship knock-back for plasma shots
pickups give 25 units instead of 10 on the energy meter
pickups no longer sway side to side
pickup hitbox size increased by 8 pixels on each side
miniboss hp reduced to 100 from 200
darkened player shots and lightened enemy bullets
made ship go to the bottom of the screen
increased ship speed to 2 from 1.5, ship speed while firing is still 1

V1.2

updated secondary weapon to a bullet canceling laser
made score indicators move to scoreboard, then delete after 75 frames
dark green enemies time out and leave the screen after five seconds
minibosses time out and leave the screen after 20 seconds

Development

This project started as a product of mild insomnia and surrendering my body and soul to the whims of the YouTube algorithm (I'm also growing potatoes in bags if you were wondering).

As I worked through the Lazy Devs Beginner Shmup tutorial, my easily distractable nature and inability to watch a video series in sequential order turned what was supposed to be a Cherry Bomb Clone into something that wasn't exactly that, but wasn't exactly mine either. And that's about the point in a project that I'd normally start to search up videos on origami or something.

Instead though, my kids joined the development team and we pushed forward. We set some attainable goals and a deadline, and now, here we are.

Credits

Art, music, and design was done by PinkOrca (my daughter, 5)
Art and design was done by RedOtter (my son, 8)
Coding (copying Lazy Devs code, creating some of my own code, and tying it together with spaghetti), music, sounds, art, and design were done by me, Joe Aguayo (middleclassjoe).

Thank you to friends and family, IRL and digitally, who put up with looking at gifs of the game and for their encouraging words.

Ultimately this cart would not exist if not for the Lazy Devs' Beginner Shmup Tutorial YouTube series. A huge thank you goes out to Krystian Majewski (Krystman, here on lexaloffle. Go check out his carts!) for this series and his excellent instruction.

If you're still reading, thank you. We look forward to any comments, critiques, bug reports, or encouraging words. We hope to apply any lessons learned here to our future projects.

MCJ, RedOtter, PinkOrca

lazydevs shmup