This game is my submission for this month’s Experimental Gameplay Project competition. The theme is upgrade.

I used ActionScript, FlashDevelop, and FlashPunk again.

Last time I promised EGP and myself the game would be experimental. It’s certainly more experimental than my previous games, but not quite enough. The ideas are there but I cheated myself and conveyed them on a shoot ‘em up genre game. Never again!

A note to EGP: When I submitted the game I had only worked on it for 7 days. Since then I’ve worked on it some more to enter it into a month-long game jam. I did not keep the 7-day version. Sorry!

Instructions

Goal:
Experiment with different upgrade setups to prevent enemies from reaching the bottom of the screen in various challenges.

Controls:
wasd or arrow keys to move
space bar to fire
f to autofire (on by default)

while in sandbox screen:
- and + to decrease or increase enemy HP (can hold the key down)
[ and ] to decrease or increase enemy spawn rate (can hold the key down)
u to enter the upgrade screen
1, 2, 3 to start a challenge

while in upgrade screen:
left click on the canvas to draw the current upgrade. This works similar to the pencil tool in a graphics editing program
*you can only draw on the ship or a neighboring pixel of the current upgrade
*you cannot overlap other upgrades
*protip, each 4-connected neighborhood is treated as a separate gun
escape to go back to sandbox screen

while in challenge screen:
escape to go back to sandbox screen

Oooone mooore thing. The boosters and challenges are actually poorly designed. Really, it’s bad.

The game should appear below this line. It’s only 147kB!

This game required a lot of interesting coding. I had to create a connected component labeling algorithm as I couldn’t find any in ActionScript. For the homing missile I had to use sin, cos, vectors, and dot product. To calculate the failure rate of upgrades I used a function that approaches a limit. This proves that if you have are motivated enough to create a product of your vision you’ll do anything to get there, even if it means going back to those dreadful middle school mathematics.

I may try to complete it and throw it on some flash portal just for the sake of completing a project, so I’m not going to publish the source code just yet. You can still grab my library which includes the connected component labeling algorithm. Also, If anyone wants to help with graphics and sound, I’m willing to collaborate.