Poorly Designed Upgrades

Play the game

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!

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.