LD43: Super Space Sacrifice

The Bork robot race is so powerful they can destroy the entire galaxy in a second. But they are not evil – they just ask for a sacrifice once every century.

The last one was 99 years ago.

Your quest is to reach the Borks and to make the sacrifice and give humans one more century of existence. Legends say you may need to make other sacrifices on your way…

Download LD43: Super Space Sacrifice or play right from your browser (via itch.io)

This is actually a prototype, developed in 48 hours for the Ludum Dare 43 game jam, in November/December 2018. The theme was sacrifices must be made. It is free, open source and way too hard to be fun.

Instructions

• This is basically a plain and simple shmup: avoid collisions with other things, shot everything that moves.
• You can equip your ship with different weapons and subsystems:
  • Armor protects against all kinds of damage. As armor is lost, you cannot fix it (but you can replace it with a new armor if you find one).
  • Shields protect against energy weapons (laser and plasma), but not against more physical damage (rockets and collisions). Shields regenerate over time.
  • Engines make your ship move faster.
  • You can find much better weapons than your initial Cheap Laser. You have a total of four weapon slots, but one of them (the bomb bay) is basically useless: bombs were forbidden by the Jupiter Convention and thus you’ll not find any in the game. (Or do you think this is just an excuse for “sorry, I didn’t have time to implement bombs”?!)
• If you have available crew members, you can use them to man weapons and subsystems. Manned things work better (faster fire rate, lower armor damage, faster movement, etc)
• To equip weapons and subsystems and to assign your crew to them, just enter in the pause/inventory menu.
• To find weapons, subsystems and crew members, just kill some enemies. Sometimes they drop the good stuff.
• Notice that to take things dropped by enemies you need at least one available cargo slot. You can destroy things in the pause/inventory screen.
• Once you get some of this gear, the game should be really easy. In fact, the first few minutes are much harder than the boss fights (which are ridiculously easy). I guess this is a symptom of bad balancing 😜
• Speaking of bosses, you cannot fight with the last level boss. He might look like an ordinary giant saucer, but in fact he is a Bork. If you have a lamb on your cargo bays, you’ll automatically sacrifice it and win the game. Otherwise, you’ll automatically lose.
• No biological lambs were harmed to make this game. The one you carry on your ship is a robotic one!

Controls, in game

• Move ship: Arrows, WASD, controller D-pad, controller left stick
• Fire: Space bar, alt, control, shift or the main controller buttons; each one fires a different weapon
• Pause/inventory screen: F1, pause on keyboard, pause or start button on the controller

Controls, inventory screen

• Select item: Arrows, controller D-pad, controller left stick
• For other actions there are on-screen instructions. Just be aware that, in order to swap one equipped item with an item in the cargo slots, you must have the equipped item selected.