Vampachi
Vampachi 🧛♀️
Dodge, evolve, survive! This is my PICO-8 take on Vampire Survivors. As a vertical shmup. It started out way more Vampire Survivors-like and turned out way more shmup-like. At least it's not just a clone.
Story
Yeah, sure. Okay, well: Help vampire hunter Liz Belmont to survive until dawn. Except dawn will never come. Sorry.
Features
Endless survival shmup gameplay
15 types of enemies
4 types of bosses
10 upgradable abilities and weapons including:
- A god-worthy hammer
- An adorable bee
- A Pac-Man
- A fluffy sheep
- A Croissant
- Melee Claws
- up to 8-way shooting (completely automated)
How to play
Just dodge everything on screen but the blue gems. Those will level up your abilities and give you bonus weapons.
Shooting is completely automated. You don't need to press any buttons.
Press C to start the game.
Use the arrow keys to move and dodge.
Or use a game controller.
To-do
- More overall balancing.
- Maybe a score system overhaul.
- A lot of optimizing to fit more stuff into my code of chaos.
Where?
Play it right here in the browser at the top of the screen.
Or download the cart and play it in your PICO-8 fantasy console.
Or search for "vampachi" in Splore of your PICO-8 fantasy console.
Cover image "Liz Belmont" illustrated by ArtVBurry.
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Development log
- Update 1.1Sep 11, 2022
- I am working on a new updateAug 21, 2022
- Update v1.0Jul 30, 2022
- New Cover ImageJul 11, 2022
- Update v0.7Jul 08, 2022
- Update v0.6Jul 03, 2022
Comments
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So fun, and the music is just really good!
Very nice and unique gameplay!
I think readability of the projectiles and weapons could be improved e.g. through colorcoding. At first I was dodging my own hammer and the bee scared me too sometimes ;D
Decent. Would be nice if shooting enemies had some indication that they were shooting enemies
Thanks. I added a small pause in movement to all bullets when they appear. So it is easier to spot them before they move across the screen.
sounds good! Consider adding some sort of flash or particle effect as well. Not sure if that'll be a good idea since there's already so much visual stuff going on, but if it works then it would be nice
awesome, a vertical stg with the vampire survivor mechanics seems like a cool idea
Thanks!
Fun game! It runs very smoothly, and I like the variety of powerup abilities and enemies. Your use of colors works well to keep things visually coherent, and the music is good. The hitboxes felt fair, too, which is good. The similarity between the friendly orbiting bee and the enemy bees was a challenge by design, I'm guessing, but that was tough!
My experience was that I got progressively better on repeat plays, but hit a plateau at the 3:00 - 3:35 mark that I couldn't pass -- it felt like there were just too many bullets/enemies to overcome, regardless of how lucky I was with powerups.
Great job with this!
Thank you for sharing your experience with my game. I may redesign the enemy bees to avoid this similarity since the game is already hard enough. And I might further smoothen the difficulty curve.