TuneFire

Overview

TuneFire is an arcade shooter where everything revolves around the music: the player and their opponent fire in synchronization with notes. The dogfight air battles feel like dancing here.

This is a bullet-hell game to a big extent. If you're not good at these, choose "casual" difficulty just to check out the gameplay.

This is an early prototype for the game jam. It was made in a few days.

The Game Off 2023 theme is Scale. I am using a musical definition of this theme: the attack type and its power (the color) depends on the current note's scale.

This game is written in Go with Ebitengine. You can find its sources on GitHub.

Features

• Music is a first-class game mechanic
• The map is unlimited, nothing limits your maneuvers
• A responsible and skill-based movement scheme
• Retro aesthetics

Controls

• Left/Right arrows, A/D - rotate
• Up arrow, W - accelerate
• Shift with rotation action - strafe
• Space, S - use special

Weapons

• Pulse Laser: forward-firing, easy to hit the target, low range
• Rear Cannon: diagonal-firing, many projectiles
• Frag Cannon: damages only upon detonation, high damage, high range
• Twin Cannon: swaps the attack side periodically, pretty high damage

Special

• Dash: pushes the vessel backward
• Spin Shield: spins the vessel, making it invulnerable, but uncontrollable
• Mega Bomb: shoots a large projectile that damages upon detonation

The special requires energy. You passively gain energy when the enemy is on your screen.

Difficulty
The difficulty doesn't change the gameplay that much in the current version. It usually just makes the enemy's HP bar bigger and the player's HP bar lower. But there are a couple of things on top of that.

• Casual: like easy, but the odds are even more into the player's side
• Easy: weak enemy, tough player, a passive HP regen
• Normal: both take 100% damage, no HP regen
• Hard: the player takes more damage; the red zone distance damages the player
• Nightmare: tough enemy, weak player; the yellow zone can also damage now

The higher difficulty means more score. You get the score based on your performance. Losing a battle gives you no score.