ShockMaze
By Paul Legovitch - Added On 6/20/2009
A vertical scrolling shooter look-alike.
First place winner of the June 2009 GameJolt "Shocking" competition :)
Find your way through the maze : bumping into walls gives you speed and shocking power.
Shooting at ennemies makes them grow bigger in size (and points).
To kill them, you have to shock'em up.
Collect stars and find the 5 ships hidden in each level, (F1 for statistics).
Use a Gamepad or the keyboard.
KEYBOARD CONTROLS :
* Arrow keys : move
* X : shoot.
* C : stop
The 4 first levels are unlocked, so you can clear them separately to access the next ones.
Graphically, the game is in 2.5D and uses strictly 2 colors (transparency is obtained by flickering). Press F3 to change the colors.
Left click to drag the window, right click to select the display.
Made in one week for the June 2009 GameJolt "Shocking" competition.
> KniteBlargh : I'm glad the colors matched your taste 'cause I love the poster you created for the contest and I love your art style in general. \('3')/
>Toadsanime : Thank you for the review ! You're right, the score is most important in the game, that's why you can access the score statistics at any time by pressing F1 (it pauses the game).
I'll try to make it clearer in the next update, it's only mentioned in the instructions.
There are warps in all levels that makes possible to explore them in their entirety and get all the stars of the maze.
As for not being able to see enemies ahead of you, you're right and I think I will add a little arrow on the top of the screen for upcoming enemies.
Most sound effects were made with modplug tracker to be tuned with the music.
Hey, I've uploaded the music with a little coda, thanks for asking !
The graphics are suitable and nice, the music was really quite lovely (I'd love it if it were accessible as a download here) and as were the sounds. The gameplay is rather enjoyable too.
At first I saw it as a problem that there were several routes with a moving screen as I'm rather a completionist, however, upon realising that you could bounce on the walls to move backwards this problem was neutralised.
Currently having only played through four levels before commenting, I do have two issues that at this present time. First of all, score is made out to be a rather important aspect of the game but there's no section on the main menu or anywhere else to view your high scores.
My only other issue that springs to mind is that not being able to see ahead of you becomes an issue with enemies as it may then be too late to bounce in order to destroy them.
All in all, this appears to be a very good, enjoyable game and I congratulate you on winning first place in GameJolt's first competition.