Space Battleship Orion: Game Boy Edition

Created for GBJam11!

Controls

WASD to move crosshairs

F to fire toward crosshairs

G to fire straight forward

Space to start

Story

It is 2052 A.D., and the Great Space War has been raging for two years. You are a captain in the U.S. Navy, in command of the USS Orion, a massive space battleship armed with powerful railguns and propelled by nuclear bombs. Your mission is the same as that of every other spaceship that came before you: to travel to the planet Mars and destroy the enemy base there. You know that the enemy has plenty of space warships of their own, and that you will be attacked many times over the course of your journey. You know that the enemy fleet greatly outnumbers yours, and that you almost certainly will not make it to Mars in one piece. However, you are determined as you have always been to take down as many enemy ships as you can before they take you down. How many do you think you can take down, player?

Gameplay

Use the controls listed at the top to aim your guns and fire at enemy ships. Your guns have a significant blind spot, though: they can't fire straight up, so you'll have to press your other button to do that. There are four types of enemy ships: destroyers, cruisers, battleships, and carriers. The farther you get from base, the more ships there will be to shoot at you, and the harder it will be to stay alive. Since this is an arcade-style game, you never actually reach Mars: you just keep going until you die or your computer crashes. It might seem easy at first, but it'll get harder the longer you play.

Before you complain about the lack of sound effects, keep in mind there is no sound in space.

Totally, Positively, Completely Non-Fictional Background Info

This is a Game Boy port of Space Battleship Orion, the original wildly popular 3D space shooter arcade game developed by ElectroBrain Entertainment in 2080. Although the Game Boy is over 90 years old now and no single individual owns a working model, we at ElectroBrain were commissioned to create a port of the arcade hit for the console by the Martian Institute of Obsolete Technology. So, for those organizations in possession of the last four or five working Game Boys in existence—enjoy!

Known Bugs

- UI text sometimes shows up fuzzy in this game. You can fix this yourself by increasing the focus (Command =)  and then decreasing it (Command -) but other than that there is no known solution to this problem.

- There is no way to save high scores to the browser yet. Your high score will be saved for only as long as you keep the tab open. This feature will be implemented sometime after the jam is over.

- The resolution increases when the game pops into full screen at startup. I recommend playing in small screen mode so the resolution change is not so apparent. There is no known solution to this problem either.

Credits

Created with Unity.

Sprites created with Piskel.

Cover image created with Google Slides.

Music created with BeepBox.

Created with help from my dad, several Google searches, and several other game jam contestants.

©2082, ElectroBrain Entertainment Inc.