LittleBear
says: Wake up and spill the coffee.
The notable games of March are: Fraxy, a very well done game of boss battles. With its visual style, its editing and sharing features, it is easily my game of the month. Gaism is an excellent 3 minute shooter while Binary Zoo gave us their take on arena shooters with Echoes.
Kenta Cho has updated L.A.2. Scoring has been added, as well as ships remaining. Expect the source as soon as sound is added. Previous post here.
Membrane Massacre is actually a pleasant surprise, despite the inclusion of an installer program. Alright, I’ll get that out of the way first. The only thing wrong with the installer in this case is it has the same name as the executable. This means, when I save it to my target directory (which happens to be the one where I want it installed) the install fails as it cannot overwrite itself. Sorted quite easily.
The experience gets better quite fast. The game is an arena shooter incorporating realistic physics with the jiggling cytoplasms. More to the point, it just looks good. The game consists of multiple waves in randomly generated levels. You use the arrow keys to move, the mouse to aim, left button to shoot, and the right button to cycle through various weapons. Blast through the walls and clear the enemies. An interesting game, I quite like it.
Prototype was the deserving winner of the first contest at Shmup-Dev, the Horizontal Shooter with Boss Competition. Now nicolas_bol has created a “proof of concept” using Java and LWJGL, discussed here.
LorenzoGatti pointed out a resource for anyone looking for some great pixel art to use. Danc has offered (well, quite awhile ago, now) the free use of two sprite sets, one from a Sinistar clone, and another from an RTS game.
There’s some really nice work here… As Danc says, “Use them, abuse them. If you make anything interesting, let me know.”
the2bears © Copyright 2004-2010
William R. Swaney. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
License. 
