Laguna Solaris

Laguna Solaris is a score attack shmup where you currently try to survive for as long as possible, or get as good of a score as possible.

THE WEB VERSION DOES NOT WORK SUPER WELL SO I SUGGEST DOWNLOADING THE WINDOWS OR OS X BUILD!

Enemy placement is random but with the spawn interval on a time-scaling difficulty level. The plan is to make a bunch of different "stages", with more enemies, bullets and power-ups etc., and keep a separate scoreboard for each of them. Eventually I want to make a full Judgement Silversword-y arcade mode where about half the stages are just this survival mode for a specific amount of time, and half have specific placements. Plus at least like 5 bosses.

Some more details:

Controls:

Arrow Keys or 'I', 'J', 'K', 'L'
Ctrl or 'X' to Fire/Confirm
'A' to toggle autofire on/off

It uses a fixed 144x160 resolution ("GameBoy in Tate-mode") that is scaled up. No stupid sub-pixel movement or anything. I started using the Pico-8 palette of 16 colors, but I did add a few more colors to it.

Scoring is based on proximity to enemy (along vertical axis) as well as how low the enemy is on the screen when it is killed - the lower the enemy is on the screen, the more points. This is mostly to spice it up a bit, and since it's harder to stay alive if you let enemies survive to get to the bottom of the screen as their bullets will eat more screen space.

You can only die from colliding with bullets, not enemies. Your hitbox is, of course, the red square in the middle of your ship.

It gets more and more difficult the longer you survive - you advance to the next difficulty level every 10 seconds. Balancing wise I tried making it pretty easy to survive the first 30 seconds (though you can always go for higher scoring to make this more difficult), having it be at least a bit of a challenge to make it to 60 seconds, and then having the game being pretty difficult after that.

High Scores and longest survival time should be saved between sessions.

Obviously I like shmups a lot but one big inspiration is the japanese game TKKN: http://homepage1.nifty.com/bee/tk/ , where you just try and avoid getting hit by asteroids for as long as possible. It's very easy to just fire up and play for a minute or two here and there. Geometry Wars 2's Pacifism mode is also great.

Any feedback is much appreciated!

Change Log:

v07 - 20160717:

-- Tweaked scoring a bit, shooting enemies in the lower half of the screen is now worth more points than before

v 05 & 04 - 20160716:

-- Tweaked difficult and added 'X' and 'IJKL' as additional inputs, as well as 'A' for autofire toggle on/off

v 03:

-- Added sound effect when dying