Blastius | GMTK Game Jam 2020

Blastius is a simple old-school space shooter with a twist: your ship's piloting system has been heavily damaged during a battle and now you can only move by boosting and "drifting" around. The result of this is a dash that can be both an offensive and a defensive manoeuvre.

Dash through enemies and hazards.

The game was hastily put together for Game Maker's Toolkit 2020 Game Jam and it's basically a prototype . There were a couple of gameplay ideas that I wanted to test here but I just couldn't make it in two days. I still want to share, however: worst that could happen is getting some feedback on how to actually improve and build on this idea. Feel free to give it a shot.

About the aforementioned Jam, this years's theme is "Out Of Control", so naturally I decided to go with something as simple as "oh no I can't control the ship the way I'm used to!". Cue drifting spaceships.  It's probably a bit forced but I think it does fit.

Graphic style heavily influenced by Ojiro Fumoto's fantastic Downwell.
Music... exists, I guess? Let's not talk about it.

As mentioned above, the game is in development, hence why I didn't even notice that it's missing a proper splash image when being launched (it loads Game Maker Studio's default image). Thanks everyone who's gonna try it despite the amount of red flags.