Forums » Games » Defender 88!

Do you hate jellyfishes? No? What about monster jellyfishes? What about over sized, monster jellyfishes that hate nuclear reactors to the point of headbutting them to death, destroying, in the process, the only energy source of the small, isolated floating fortress where you and your dear family spend your living days?

What about now, do you hate jellyfishes now? Because in this underwater shoot'em up you (that's right!) get to pilot the submarine unit Defender 88 (D-88, for friends and acquaintances) and to protect three generators with your life, machine guns and mighty torpedoes. Dash like a madman through curtains of bubbles, dodging ever increasing waves of evil medusoid creatures while shooting them in the face. Do jellyfishes even have faces? They do now.

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Defender 88 is Midipixel Games (a two man team from Brazil) entry for the 2015 Game Boy Jam. In this jam, all teams had 10 days to create a game with two GB limitations: 160x144 resolution and only four colors. We had a blast developing this game in ImpactJS and we would love to let you guys play our game and tell us what you think!

Controls

WASD keys: control the D-88
K: fire the machine gun
J: fire the torpedo
L: use turbo fuel
SPACE: confirm

Maybe I'm just really bad, but I found the controls kind of difficult. I found it difficult to line up my gun fire because even if I got a jellyfish in line for a moment, I'd have to retreat away so I don't touch him, and doing so points my gun in the opposite direction, so I miss. Would be cool if the submarine could move backward while retaining fire direction (if already started at time of direction change).

Graphics are awesome. Decent sound. Nice tutorial functionality. Good deal of polish. Very nice work.

Uh, this game is real fun. But the controls need some polish. The up-down control is very hard, compared to the agility of the jellies. And also strafing would be very nice (just keep the heading of the ship constant when I press move buttons while I'm shooting)

Awesome sounds and graphics. I think the constraints of the GameBoy style help.

Also I like the message "space" to skip which came on just when I wondered what to do next to start.

Took me a while to figure out I was shooting at the jellyfish and not the big sphere generator thing.

I bet controls feel better with a D-pad.

Hey, folks, thanks for taking the time to play our little game! :)

We're SOOO glad you liked the graphics and the music! For a 10 days project, we're very proud of our results!

About the controls, we know it's kinda hard right now, you're right. We're planning on replacing the current one with a different control scheme which uses the mouse. Something like this:

WASD: control the submarine
Space Bar: turbo
Mouse Cursor: aim the submarine
Left click: machine gun
Right click: torpedo

What do you guys think of that? This way, the player will be able to strafe/shoot while moving backwards.

ALSO: I'd like to ask you guys to please vote on our game for GBJam, in case you liked it! It would mean the world to us!

Quote from yhsper
WASD: control the submarine
Space Bar: turbo
Mouse Cursor: aim the submarine
Left click: machine gun
Right click: torpedo

What do you guys think of that? This way, the player will be able to strafe/shoot while moving backwards.

That sounds pretty good, actually.

Same thing as everyone else -- I felt like I was fighting the submarine to aim and float at the same time. Something like a mouse aim would be very sweet.

The polish level is great. I liked the art and music.

Thank you very much, guys, for playing our game and for your awesome feedback! GBJam is over and we landed the lucky 13th place! We're very proud of what we achieved, considering the small time we had to develop the game and the overall quality of the other games participating in the jam.

We're already working on a new version which will probably overhaul the controls, as we've talked before, and will also feature other improvements, such as connecting to Gamejolt's API, smoothing out the game learning curve and difficulty, and some tweaks here and there.

We're going to keep you guys posted on the news here in the forums, but if you guys feel like following our game in Gamejolt too, that would be great!

Thanks again! :)