Nathan Boles Games

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SHMUP Survivors

[Solo Developer]

A solo project created using Pico-8 for the University of Baltimore Continuum exhibition. The game takes heavy inspiration from Vampire Survivors put into a more traditional top-down Shoot-Em-Up framework. Here you have an endless number of enemies spawning in towards the players ship. They have to focus on maneuvering the ship around while it fires automatically, collecting upgrades and defeating enemies.

An animation of the start screen for SHMUP Survivors before showing the starting seconds of the game.
An animation of the middle part of the game as enemies spawn from teh sky while the ship shoots and dodges them.
An animation of the end point of the game where enemies swarm the screen and the player gets overwhelmed, leading into a game over screen.

This project was my first foray into using LUA. And, despite a number of hiccups along the way, I believe I did rather well overall. The game was designed to emulate the type of games you would find on arcade machines in the late 70's - early 80's. In fact, the game itself was designed with the intention of being made into a mini arcade machine, though that idea sadly wasn't able to happen in time for the exhibition it was presented in. Overall the game has proven itself to be an interesting challenge to undertake, and one that I do want to continue developing in the future.