Okay, so my recently-sparked interest in Game Maker has given me something of an idea, I’m going to try producing a quick monthly round-up of new shoot ‘em ups built with GM, listing five of note and three more where things didn’t quite work out. The only “rule” is that the games must have been uploaded to Yoyo Games within the specified month.
Endless Battle by XgamemasterX
This is a mouse-controlled boss battle where the player’s ship has the option of three primary weapons, each with a dedicated power gauge to worry about – flattening the bar will temporarily disable the weapon until it’s recharged. The mouse control is reasonable considering the busy nature of the game with the left button firing the selected primary gun and right triggering a missile attack and the only real issue is weapon selection being made with the mouse wheel, more because it’s overly sensitive.
Castle Marauder by KimboRambo
An arena shooter that presumably went to the Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved school of game design, but wasn’t keen on the lesson about twin stick control so took an evening course in mouse-based aiming. The “stand out” feature is the black on white monocolour graphics, they’re not particularly eye catching as such and when there are lots of particles around it’s problematic telling what is actually happening but not plumping for glowing vectors is something of a plus.
The Future by Makermancan102
A glimpse into the future where shoot ‘em ups have automatically firing guns and significant collision areas… actually, this should be more of a pain than it is, with that large hit box and only the one life it’s pretty much out to get the player from the get go but for some reason I found myself drawn back for “just one more go” a fair few times.
EverGlow by Makermancan102
This one isn’t strictly a shoot ‘em up because the player doesn’t get to fire during play – instead it’s a dodging game with each short attack wave consisting of a number of spawning points that kick out scads of bullets. It’s fun, although when things get seriously busy the job of spotting the bullets amongst the over-the-top particle effects does become difficult.
Hi-Voltage by P200031
And finally, some more gratuitous pyrotechnics, but this time with the ability to fire back! As with EverGlow, the effect overload occasionally buries the hazards (in particular when the effect is turned up temporarily after something is shot) but generally speaking this is a no frills but solid blaster with a high difficulty curve and only one life issued at the start; it’s only the lack of sound which really lets it down at all, even a couple of spot effects would’ve sufficed but sadly the entire game is utterly silent.
And now the three that didn’t fare quite as well.
Assignment Two by vicda
The “art style” is primitive and the backgrounds rather lurid, but the real passion killer has to be the control system; the player’s tank is moved horizontally with the A and D keys, space bar fires a shot but the aiming is via the mouse so the most successful technique I’ve found to date is not moving at all, purely concentrating on aiming and hammering the space bar like you hate it, which usually descends into an orgy of CPU-grinding particle effects.
Space Invaders – Remastered by AClockWorkLemon
What is it with people trying to reinvent the Space Invaders wheel and getting something square?! It might appear simple from a design perspective, but everything in there was done for a reason and Space Invaders Remastered misses some of the main points by several leagues.
Mission In Space – Elite Mission by Storyrock
This isn’t all that bad to be honest, sort of like Asteroids with fixed direction for the player ship. The problem is the execution, the controls locked down to either X or Y movement without being aware of diagonals, the enemy with the large vertical or horizontal laser fires in too erratic a manner to move around safely and re-spawning on top of something fatal happens far too often. Whilst annoying, the MS Paint look could’ve been ignored if those issues were attended do.
