Schmuppy: A PICO-8 Arena Shmup

I made another PICO-8 game. Actually, this is the first one I made. This one’s a wave-based arena shoot-em-up called Schmuppy.

You pilot a little ship through endless waves of increasingly dangerous aliens. Your weapons auto-fire forward, so the whole game is about positioning. One hit and you’re dead, but you get 3 lives and a brief invincibility window on respawn.

Enemy types

Five enemy types roll in as you progress, and the later waves mix them all together:

Type	Appears	Behavior
Drifter	Wave 1	Floats in straight lines, bounces off walls
Chaser	Wave 3	Homes toward you, accelerates when close
Shooter	Wave 5	Wanders slowly, periodically fires bullets at you
Splitter	Wave 7	Splits into 2 smaller fast drifters on death
Bomber	Wave 10	Moves to a position and drops expanding explosion zones

Drifters are easy pickings early on, but by wave 8 you’ve got chasers closing in, shooters lobbing projectiles, splitters popping into fast mini-drifters, and bombers dropping pulsing explosion zones all at once. It gets to be alot, pretty quickly.

Pickups

Enemies have a 10% chance to drop a pickup on death:

• S (Spread Shot) — 3-way fire for 8 seconds
• + (Extra Life) — +1 life (max 5)

The spread shot is a cool thing to have when things get dense. It gives you three guns for 8 seconds, which can make a big difference.

Controls

Input	Action
↑ / ↓	Move forward / backward
← / →	Strafe left / right
Z	Rotate counter-clockwise
X	Rotate clockwise

Weapons fire automatically in the direction you’re facing. There’s no fire button; just fly around while your gun auto-fires.

All procedural

Everything is drawn with code, so the game will be different every time, and will run as long as you stay alive. There’s a parallax scrolling starfield in the background, explosion particles with fade-out, screen shake on death, and white flash on enemy hits. The high score is saved with cartdata.

Play it

You can play Schmuppy at the Lexaloffle BBS. It runs in any modern browser — no install needed.