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Y5:W25 - [V~S] Vertical Shooter Blog
18th June 2013
For the past few years, I've been building and rebuilding a silly little experimental shooter thing called "Horizontal Shooter"
The basic gist is that it's a bog standard horizontal shooter, but with a weird control scheme, and a tail to catch things in.
I also tend to use Horizontal Shooter as a simple testbed, to see what a language can/can't achieve in the realms of simplistic blurry lovelyness.

This time around, since we're also focusing on mobile devices, I've decided to flip things around, and make it a Vertical Shooter instead.

-=-=-

Beware, we're in experimental territory, here!!

First off, an all new control scheme, mostly born out of Android Compatibility worries.

For starters, the player's ship auto-fires. This is a rarity, especially in the world of [H~S]! Usually you have limited "Squeeeeeeee" ammo, but this time around it's a simple constant rhythmic fire pattern.

Second the controls are "Swoop" based.. If you're playing on a PC, you'll need to keep the mouse button held down. I might tweak that, later!!
Move a little, and the ship moves a lot.
How much it's amplified can be tweaked in the Pause Menu.

Third, Gameplay wise we're mixing up the nice Swoopy tail of Horizontal Shooter with the "Kill them and they come at you!" death ball thing from the Amstrad CPC classic Space Hawks!
Once hit, enemies turn into a ball of death.. SpikeDislike!
Avoid the balls, or you lose health.
However, if the balls get below the bottom of the screen, they ALSO hurt you!
Instead, you have to swoop around them, and try to collect the deathballs using your trail.
A simple premise, but a tricky one!

And lastly, the background blur can be switched off and on in the pause menu. Previous efforts at "Incomplete CLS" have been broken, but I'm not sure if the newer edition of Monkey has fixed it. Let me know!

Um, I think that's everything!

You can Download [V~S] Vertical Shooter (experimental!) here for Windows, Android and playable in your browser via HTML5.
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