Island of Glowing Maple

Commentary

So this was my first somehow finished game that was done not completely in solo by me, since it was project for university. It's ultimately unfinished due to not having the final level (you know, the one with the actual maple), and then due to my complete lack of skill as a team leader I still ended up doing most of the work anyway. But still, I think at least some of it turned out to be neat, and I just want to publish it and move on, I'm not planning on working on this game any further.

- Hasmile

Island of Glowing Maple is a vertical danmaku shooter, primarily inspired by Touhou.
The game is set in a world where magic and spirits exist, and all sorts of whimsical and yet beautiful events happen.
You play as Vasyl', a wildcat... despite being a wildcat he lives in a village and has home. Strange events started to happen in his village, and his senses lead him to the island in the river near the village, due to the local giant maple tree starting to glow, which, as beautiful as it is, was weird.

How to play

The game in general follows typical STG gameplay. You have Vasyl' on screen. You can move him in any direction within limited screen area where all the gameplay occurs.

You will have to deal with enemies that will appear on the screen. These enemies also fire bullets which you have to dodge. Player's hitbox is really small to enable player dodging from dense bullet clusters.  If bullet or enemy touches your hitbox then you die. You only have single life, although you can continue with the usage of coins, the game gives you 3 at the start of new playthrough. If bullet or enemy is close to hitbox but doesn't touch it, it will score you graze point, as well as add one point to bomb counter. Bomb counter gets decreased over time. If your bomb counter reaches 10, then you unlock a bomb. Using it will clear space around Vasyl' from bullet for a limited amount of time, as well as heavily damaging enemies in the same radius. When bomb is unlocked, if something hits you then you will have a small cooldown to use it and cancel your death, but it still activates the bomb. You can only have one bomb at any given moment. Enemies drop pick ups when they get killed. There are two types of possible items: star item, which will give points to general score, and power item, which increases your shot power, increasing the amount and variations in the bullets you shoot, which allows to kill enemies faster.

Controls

• Up, Down, Left, Right arrows - player movement

• Left Shift - hold continuously to focus

• Z - hold continuously to fire

• X - press to use bomb.

• UI navigation uses arrow keys and Enter.

Credits

• Hasmile - game idea, engine programming, graphics and music, level design, level programming

• SkyWarpX27X - gameplay programming, level programming

• Eugenot - level design and programming

The game uses Pixeloid font by GGBotNet. Shout out to them for making life with text a bit easier. #shooter