Vulcan
Dedicated to Elliot Wright
INTRODUCTION
In the future, alien drones plague human protectorates. These infestations are known as Vulcan. You are a salvaged drone ship tasked with destroying Vulcan. Wipe out the mechanical threat at all 10 protectorates - each protectorate is more perilous than the last.
CONTROLS
Use W, A, S, D keys to move
Use L-click to shoot
Use R-click to boost&shield (speeds you up, shield from bullets, instantly kill enemies)
use L-shift to attempt to scan enemy
TIPS
Enemy drones, once destroyed, will drop salvaged parts
small parts restore energy
large parts restore energy and upgrade your weapons system
your weapon systems will downgrade if hit
Scan enemy ships as soon as possible to adapt your systems
once your scanner hits the enemy your systems will adapt
new systems depend on enemy the enemy drone scanned
Energy = Health and Ammo
energy lowered when:
shooting and shielding
getting hit
energy recovers over time
Sprites created by myself in Aseprite
Sound effects generated through https://jfxr.frozenfractal.com/
Music by Elliot Wright, in his words - "a little cover of japanese math rock band toe's `1/21.'"
Download
Install instructions
No escape menu built into the downloadable version, recommend to play in-browser.
Comments
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Hi, I like your game a lot. :D I keep coming back to play it because...its fun. :) I love it when games are simplistic and easy to understand and I also just like top down shooters. The upgrades add a lot of fun to the game and the overall gameplay mechanics work really good.
There are two things that are a little bit probelmatic for me:
1. The movement is a bit too slow for my taste. But it's just a personal preference. I still think it works fine.
2. This is a little bit frustrating: Enemies keep spawing in me and than I die and than it's over. xD Would be cool if that wouldn't happen.
But congrats on your game. I like it. :)
Hi Sunny, thanks so much for leaving a comment and your feedback. I'm glad you enjoy playing the game.
The movement speed - yeah I played around with the different ship speeds. The first few builds of the game had everything moving a lot faster, here's an imgur link of a very early build https://imgur.com/a/QK36CXg I eventually slowed it down to match the music and I also thought it added a bit of tension. Also the slow movement speed makes the boost from the shield ability more noticeable. I think the game could be sped up slightly though.
The enemies spawning - I kept running into this problem too and decided to implement the "egg" looking pre-spawned enemies so you could see where they will appear before you will actually be killed be colliding with one. The problem then is that if there was too much headsup on where the enemies would spawn it broke the flow of the gameplay and you would be able to easily shoot at where the enemies would appear. I tried to find a balance on this and made the "egg" pre-spawn animation appear briefly, but I admit I'll even collide with the spawned enemies leading to a frustrating run. I think the headsup on the spawn time could be slightly increased as well.
Yes you're totally right, the movement speed matches the music really well (which is pretty cool by the way). It all comes down to personal taste but it totally works. :)
The pre-spawned enemies are a good idea. But would there be the possibility to just not let enemies spawn in or in the direct vicinity of the player? Because that's the actual problem. For me at least.
But those are just small details. As I said - it's a really nice game. :)
Are you planning on releasing it on mobile? I think it would fit well (although the three action buttons may need some extra thinking on the phone screen).
The music is really nice. The slow bullet hell with the shield mechanic is very interesting in that it rewards the player for playing closer.
As a negative point, the salvaged parts were difficult to interpret. I guess they are placeholder and I actually needed to read the title screen :). This title screen was a bit cluttered, I would try to rely less on text there. I would also try to make the enemies a bit more different in aspect (although I think that the simplistic look is part of its charm).
Finally, the scan action with the upgrades add a lot of replayability. A very nice job!
This is my first game so everything you said is really valuable. My artistic abilities aren't too great so I tried to keep the graphics/colors as simple as possible which actually constrained some of the gameplay a bit since, as you said, some of the mechanics like different enemies/powerups can be difficult to interpret. Thanks for playing and for the feedback, I really appreciate the time you took to do so!
And I am thinking about adapting it to mobile once I tinker out a good enough control/aiming scheme. I think it would work well.
Really cool! The music is good.
The movement feels kinda weird. That might be me being bad, but I'm putting it in just to let you know
Yeah the movement is very rigid and doesn't have any momentum just so you can precisely avoid enemy bullets. Thanks for playing and for the feedback!