What!?

I have been working for a few months in the very brief moments I can on a game called Mainframe. It's a fast paced twin stick shooter game inspired by the likes of Contra, Ikaruga, Geometry Wars, and a few others. It's look is inspired by that of 80's album art. So neon grids and wire frame tessellated mountains with a space themed backdrop. I don't have the full look fleshed out right now so enemies are just primitives with some shader stuff going on and you won't see much of an environment yet. I wanted to start a quick post that will hopefully roll out to be my devblog for the game. I made some prototypes and tested it with friends and have found some new inspiration for the gameplay and how I want it to go. I will create a more in depth post on that later though. Right now I just want to demonstrate a new weapon polarity mechanic and the flood spawner.

The weapon polarity mechanic is inspired heavily by Ikaruga. An enemy of a positive polarity cannot be hit by a matching polarity weapon from the player. The player can slot two weapons at a time and switch between them whenever they want. The only way to destroy an enemy is to hit them with the opposite polarity. Again I don't have the art fleshed out yet so right now purple enemies are negative and orange enemies are positive. So the player has to switch to the opposite color from their weapons.

The flood spawner is just something I recently added as an enemy type that will continuously spawn an enemy every nth second up to a cap of how many can be alive from that spawner at any given time pulling from a max amount to be allowed by the spawner. So if 10 are alive then the spawner will wait until one dies before spawning another. At some point in a level the player will be bombarded by this enemy type and need to hold them off until their objective is complete. These enemies just want to get in close and explode near you to deal damage. I have a video below so have a look. I'll post more of the overall game concept in my eventual devblog.