Black Matter Bards

Controls:
Player 1: WASD, Shift to Shoot, E for Map
Player 2: YGHJ, M to Shoot, T for Map
(Keyboard rollover of 6+ is recommended for multiplayer)
Advance Text or Skip Cutscenes with Space

Plot Summary:
Aliens came to Earth to steal our WiFi, but once humans discovered the weakness to their technology was lower energy frequencies, such as that in sound, they had to take all of our musical instruments too! Along with that, they even took the world's greatest musicians as hostages. As roadies of the tone-deaf rock band, the Black Matter Bards, your job is to rescue the lead band members and all the rest of the musicians! Maybe you can solve the mystery of why the aliens want our WiFi, and even take it back too! #shooter #roguelike #multiplayer

Made for the Opera GX Game Jam!

#OperaGxGameJam #OperaGX #GameJam

Gameplay Details:
Your objective is to destroy the power cores on each randomly generated UFO you enter. Doing so will trigger a self-destruct sequence on the ship, which will require that you return to your starting place to escape!

The game features multiple difficulty settings, including options to improve combat and controls, two unique bosses as well as more difficult rematches for each, and also some unlockable cheat codes to have some fun effects. Cheat codes are unlocked by completing objectives and then viewing the rewards room from the main menu. The objectives are as follows:

Defeat 20 enemies in a single level,
Defeat 150 enemies in a single journey,
Reach game level 30,
Reach game level 50,
Collect 5Mb/s of WiFi in a single level,
Collect 100Mb/s of WiFi in total,

Technical Features (For those interested):
We wanted to find a way to reduce the file size of game music beyond what was regularly doable, and so the background music during gameplay is actually dynamically loaded into the game as a midi file, and then played using individual notes on each instrument you can use in the game. While reading midi is already possible with GameMaker, given by the extensions that exist on the marketplace for just that, these extensions lack functionality on the HTML5 platform. This is because they require binary file reading functions, which do not work on this export option for whatever reason that is. In order to get around this, we actually read the files in as a buffer, and sorted out the data that way. Before this, I had never actually used buffers, so it was a great learning experience and a fun way to use it! It allows for the weapons in game to synchronize with the sound track, although the drawback is that any game lag will also cause lag in the music.

The other challenge we faced was creating the randomly generated UFOs, though that wasn't much more than a lot of trial and error. If you read this far, have a free cheat code! 1101100100 is for inverted colors. Not useful, but it exists.

We had a lot of fun making and testing this game, so we hope you enjoy it too!