Chained Enemies

These appear in a chain from around four to eight—I think (it's been a while). They aren't especially intelligent yet, they just progress from the right side of the screen to the left. They're also very fragile individually—a single bullet will taken any one of them out. However, you have to destroy the whole chain in order to spawn a pretzel or a powerup. Think of them as a tactical mix-em-up.

I'm planning to color shift the graphics a bit and have more complicated chains in the future, which might follow a manhattan map or a random Bézier curve. One thing at a time, of course.

As an interesting side effect, there's enough going on on-screen that I believe I've finally crossed the threshold into "Bullet Hell". The chain enemies don't shoot at you—I tried that, and it got very unmanageable very quickly. Soon enough I'll have to start scaling spawns by difficulty and time playing!

Hint: You can often take a chunk out of one of these chains with a bottle-throw.