The retro aesthetic is awesome, and the gameplay feels fluid and fun. Congratulations!
Play game
Zavala's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Visual | #6 | 4.429 | 4.429 |
| Overall | #19 | 3.857 | 3.857 |
| Audio | #21 | 3.714 | 3.714 |
| Fun | #44 | 3.571 | 3.571 |
| Theme | #49 | 3.571 | 3.571 |
Ranked from 14 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Did you use any third-party assets or skeleton code?
I made everything during the jam
Comments
Missed on arcade when I was a kid, guess it's time to cath up! Feels great and I really admire the art style.
Submitted
getting out!The visuals and audio are impressive. I can't appreciate the emulation work (Because I lack the knowledge, not because I don't think it's cool), but this felt very good to zip around in.
Submitted
Snail BlazerI liked the idea of emulating an old system, and I think it's very well done in both sound and art! The game feels very snappy and good to control, and I like both the idea and the style!
The issue I found most frustrating has already been mentioned, which was the pickups being hard to get. Other than that, the main problem I had was not knowing what killed me, sometimes. One time one of the skulls barely damaged me with one shot, only for the next shot to instantly kill me from 400+ Power, so unfortunately it felt a bit random to me at times! Maybe I missed something during the quite frantic gameplay.
Well done, the game feels very polished overall!
Submitted
MSMG 2Thank you for your kind words! 💙 In the, ahem, “spirit” of the old-fashioned retro game, there are no i-frames. Instead, the longer a bullet is in contact with you, the more damage it causes. The skulls fire clouds of 3 or more bullets at once, and if all those intersect, they become very deadly, very quickly. The amount of danger that you’re in is shown by the shaking animation of your sprite … but if you’re hit with five bullets at once, you’re usually dead in 1/20th of a second. 🤔 After the jam, I’ll see about making hits less punishing without trivializing them.
What an incredibly faithful retro shooter! Love the aesthetic and found the gameplay to be surprisingly deep. After reading the game page and figuring out how to increase the multiplier, the game became even more challenging! Great work!
Submitted
Bounce BlastThank you for your kind words! 💙 During the DOS Game Jam, the final design had only one type of enemy, and I was thinking about how boring the score would be if it only measured kills. 🤔 Putting in a score multiplier to reward riskier play (waiting for enemies to get closer, letting your gun run empty, etc.) was easy to implement. Many bullet hells keep track of “grazing”, so I thought that a score multiplier might be nice to do here. The “don’t bomb” rule was added at the 11th hour, and I’m rather pleased with how it adds replay value. 😄
I love the art style of this game, really really cool music too. There's a lot of polish here and a lot to love. My only gripe would be the hit boxes for collecting items is a little precise. Other than that, great game dude :)
Submitted
Too Many LettersThis looks and feels so good! A wonderfully crunchy 8-bit aesthetic combined with contemporary fluid gameplay. What's not to love? Wonderful music too.
As someone who enjoys MSX-era shmups, I had a fun time and felt the difficulty was about-right. My score when I won was 44554, and I'd be curious to try again later and see how much I can improve. The patterns were clear and smooth to navigate, and returning fire was satisfying. The bombs are very cool, though I struggled to spot the best time to use one. I popped one in the middle of the game, but otherwise found them not necessary, and ended up just burning them on the boss. I also appreciated that the game rewarded me for firing accurately (with the charge) instead of holding the button, though I wonder if such steep damage scaling isn't a potential trap for inexperienced players.
Thanks for sharing such a great game!
-mothgram
Submitted
I'll Cut You DownThank you for kind words. 💙 The play rewards you for not using the bombs, as they decrease your score multiplier, so it’s a good compromise.
Near the end of the jam, I thought of a way to put in a difficulty selection, where you could scale the amount of damage taken, to make play more or less challenging. But I didn’t want to miss deadline. After the jam, I’ll see if I can implement it.
I would look into a more streamlined installation process. Even if it was just the folder and you press the executable, that way once I'm done with it I can delete one folder and its gone instead of looking for where it saved others.
The music is cool and fits the look of the game. I really like the visuals, the wanky pixelation as characters move feels very retro I like it.
The gameplay is fairly simple but still enjoyable. The one thing I might suggest is to make the bullets that hurt you more visually obvious.
Overall a cool submission.
Submitted
Naked Man With a GunI love animation when you get hit ! graphics are very nice for the eye . Good job!
Submitted
God Of Balance is not fairI have prevailed.
I had missed the weapon charging at first and just kept the button pressed so I could not manage to beat the skulls. After reading the game description and a couple of extra retries I managed to keep my power all along the game and eventually win.
The game looks and sounds good and it is very fun, the controls and feedback work, the roster of enemies and enemy formations is good for the scope of the game and the difficulty is right on point.
Very cool work, thanks for sharing.
Submitted
A peaceful garden ?The TI99/4a was a curious computer. While it had numerous innovations (32 sprites handled by hardware, user-definable characters, sound synthesis with both square waves and two types of noise, a 16-bit processor), it was highly compromised (an 8-bit bus, Dartmouth BASIC in a slow virtual machine, small memory space with hardwired addressing, etc.) This computer clearly was meant to be a stepping stone to better things to come, which never came to pass. (Commodore Business Machines won a savage pricing war, and the business market supported Intel-based PCs.)
Today, more people are familiar with the MSX line of computers, which used the same visual-processor and sound-processing hardware, but with a core Zilog-80. The TI99/4a has all the same restrictions (only four 1-bit sprites per scan-line, no hardware scrolling) but slightly worse. In the spirit of this year’s theme of “limited”, would it be possible to make a bullet hell? 🤔
The TI does support raster interrupts and bank-switching, and the memory is expandable from cartridges (which TI calls “solid-state software command modules” 😊). There’s been some new games for it in recent years, with very impressive work! In all candor, I didn’t try to do a deep dive into how TMS9900 assembly works. This game was made in GameMaker 2, but with the limitations of the TI in mind.
- With only four sprites per scan-line, the bullets would need to be rendered on the tile layer. Eight tiles were reserved for a pattern of three. The bullets themselves are tracked on a pixel level, then rendered in a pass using the custom characters. This technique gives very satisfying results.
- The TI joystick — or as the manual calls it, the “Wired Remote Controller” — only has one button. But the TI also has a functional keyboard, so we assume you would need to be close enough to press the space bar to use your screen-clearing bomb. (Or you could ask your younger sibling to press it for you.)
- For maximum control, the player’s avatar is a freely-moving sprite. All enemies are rendered using the tileset. The player has full control over each 60fps frame, whereas enemies are often resolved every fourth or even every eight frame.
- We wanted to avoid a complex upgrade scheme. There’s a limited number of objects we can display. “Options” and other add-ons would be too much clutter. We also wanted to avoid getting killed and losing all upgrades. The compromise here is that your “power” is both your life-bar status and your offensive power.
- Enemy “sprites” can only move on tile divisions. To disguise this, enemies often move quickly. Or their sprites have jittery animations (flapping wings, turning wheels, etc).
- The color palette has 15 colors: black, and fourteen colors all with 50% brightness or more! 🕶️ To keep the background from being distracting, pixels are drawn on every other vertical line. (Presumably, it would like nice and ghostly on your tube television.)
- The ground is about 16 tiles, pixel-shifted to look like scrolling in perspective. (For real hardware, this setup would need to be optimized if not scrapped entirely.)
- There’s no priority for sprites - they’re always on top. To add a little more dimension, an enlarged sprite is scrolled at regular intervals. It’s solid black to avoid being too distracting. Just this one little feature immensely helped the look and feel.
- To reward riskier play, a score multiplier was added. This feature takes up very few resources while being very easy to implement.
- Most of the sound is reserved for the music. With three square-wave voices and one noise generator, there’s a lot to work with! It’s no wonder this chip was very popular with JP manufacturers, with a long legacy in consoles and in arcades. Thanks again to Moult for contributing our opening theme and its high-pitched whistle.
- Because the TI is a “business machine”, it needed to support a forty-column screen. (That’s what “business” meant in the 8 bit era.) So the TI has a 40-column mode that is only 240 pixels wide, with 6x8 tiles. Then the TI’s built-in font is characters in only 5x7 pixels, which explains why it has that unique, wide spacing. (I’m not sure what explains the choice to use small-caps instead of lower-case letters, but it must have made sense to someone at Texas Instruments. 🤔)
When pursuing a retro gaming project, I always like to think about what challenges the original programmers had faced, how they would address these challenges, and what unique games they might create in these conditions. This is just a small happiness I can give you. Share and enjoy. 💙
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.