Godot Wild Jam 69

Controls

wasd or arrow keys	movement
q/e or mouse thumb buttons	turn 90 degrees (you move _much_ faster in the direction your ship is facing, you can only shoot forward)
shift or right mouse button	boost (has a cooldown when canceled or run out, has a maximum duration, auto cancels if you stop moving while using it). The boost can be a very important _offensive_ tool in this game, not only used for dodging
spacebar or left mouse button	shoot (you can only have a limited amount of bullets on screen at a time, they have a lifespan and disappear/renew - of course hitting something restores them immediately)
o	open options menu while in game, secret cheats menu is also accessible in game if you unlock it via typing "godot", "wild", "jam", "69" (any of the sequences will work, you don't need all of them)
r	reset the whole game back to the title screen (specially useful in case some progress/state breaking bug happens)

Known Bugs / Issues / Quirks

- For the sake of this being a JAM game, I've disabled death, even if you go to zero health you can keep on going to see the rest (if you wish).
- You are supposed to be able to go indefinitely in any direction and still find something, if you are in the complete void with seemingly nothing around for 5 to 10 seconds, try boosting, it is semi-required. If even after boosting in a straight line for a little bit you still found nothing, that logic probably broke... I ran into a few edge cases with it and not sure I'll manage to iron them all out until due date, doesn't help that this seems to happen very rarely (which makes it more time consuming to fix).
- There are visible seams in the parallax background, that's an artifact of combining multiple noise functions (even though each has a seamless skirt), may or may not have time to fix it until the end of the jam.
- Bullets might not always really behave in a predictable way because physics... if I have the time I'll get rid of it and hand craft the bullet movement.

Feedback

- Feel free to be mean/harsh when providing feedback - if you can also provide suggestions on how to improve what you didn't like, I'd appreciate it even more though.
- Keep in mind, I know my art/music and (lack of) taste for colors is awful, I'm 99.99% programmer and this is a solo project. Pointing that out doesn't really hurt me, but it's not particularly useful.
- Controls are a bit strange on purpose, it's not meant to feel like an arcade shoot'em up or a twin stick shooter. I'm going for a more a methodical pay attention to each shot type of vibe.
- Yes, I know, using physics for bullets is extremely dumb :shrug:.

Mechanics (maybe spoilery?)

- Every enemy in the game can only be one-shot, bullets that would do less than maximum damage will bounce off of their powerful armor.
- There are no power ups to increase your bullet damage, so you have to use other means to defeat stronger enemies. Bullets can absorb other bullets, and they carry momentum based on your own speed when you fire them, you can also try to play "ping pong" with enemies since your weak bullets bounce. At higher difficulty levels you might have to "beam struggle" with the enemy.
- The goal of the game is to the restore the memories of the universe (and your own) filling the void that distorted reality itself. In extreme explicit spoilery terms: spawn enemies from 3 corrupt planets by approaching them, collect the 3 memory fragments, enter the portal, final boss encounter, victory lap.

Game made for the Godot wild JAM # 69

Your tiny little ship, with barely functioning systems, lost in the vastness of a seemingly distorted space. You're not quite sure how you got here, but you have a sense that you've been here before.

Theme: Void

This game interprets the theme "void" in 2 ways:

- The void of space (probably a very common interpretation, I assume a LOT of people are going for that... space, black holes, vacuum, etc).
- The void caused by the loss of one's memories, the universe itself can't quite remember how/where things are supposed to be after some brain-like creatures appeared and started to consume the very fabric of reality.

Wildcard 1: Give me a Minute

- You are aboard of a little ship (or are you?) and a lot of it's features are subject to a cooldown, you can only fire so many bullets at once, you can only boost for so long (requiring a painful cooldown period afterwards).
- Hidden Cooldown: encounter spawns are also on a (very short, to not get annoying) cooldown.

Wildcard 2: Memory Lane

- Soft interpretation (mechanic was inspired by the wildcard): The very bullets that your ship fire seem to have a strange sense of memory, when past and future collide, something amazing might happen.
- Revisit the planets you saved from the memory devouring scourge for one final victory lap

Wildcard 3: What's This?

- Typing "69" or "wild" on the main menu unlocks the cheaty advanced options, allows you to change player health, max health, and number of bullets on screen

Made Using

- Godot 4.3-dev-6
- Neovim (no one deserves the misery of using the builtin editor)
- Aseprite + Aseprite Wizard
- Godot SFXR port

Credits / Thanks

- b3agz (on twitch/youtube): his streams got me the itch to get back into game dev
- paperjack (jam's discord): provided some pretty nice references/suggestions and tasteful particle effects
- jotson (creator of gravity ace): his article on nebula shaders inspired me to write my own instead of stealing some creative commons from shadertoy or godotshaders. While mine looks a lot worse than most things I could find, it was satisfying to work it out myself.

Music:

"Unseen Horrors" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"The Escalation" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"Dark Fog" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
"That Zen Moment " Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)