LUMEN EATER

Little horizontal shoot 'em up/STG/sky ballet with one level and hand-drawn art for The Worst Game Jam (2025) theme "A Beacon in the Dark".

I intended to submit this to the jam on time but I uploaded the actual executable for the game a few days late.

For the theme, there is a gimmick where darkness clouds part of the scene, and you can charge the light to decrease the darkness, but charging cuts shooting frequency in half and enemies take less damage when covered.

The controls are:

• Arrow keys to move
• X or SPACE to shoot
• Z to bomb
• C to charge light
• ESC to pause
•  
• In lieu of difficulty settings, there is a super secret cheat code where if the key you press for the "Press any key to start" is a number between 4 and 9, you start the game with that many lives and bombs. The default for both is 3.

(I don't have a Windows computer, but I'd like to try running the exe on Steam Deck, and if I get that going I'll try to add controller support!!)

Details and Credits (last updated in January 2025):

• I used the LÖVE (love2d) framework to make this game. The game source code is here. My job is in software development, and I am less intimated by this code-first framework than more robust frameworks/tools with GUIs. This was my second time developing a love2d game/a game in general! Over the summer I started learning this stuff for the first game jam in The Worst Garbage (TWG) discord, Into The Game Jam — Summer 2024. While I didn't finish/submit anything for that jam, I did learn so much about gamedev generally and love2d specifically, and I reused some of the patterns/libraries/code from that experience for this game.
• When starting this project, I searched around itch.io and stumbled on two shmups made in love2d with their source code available. They gave me confidence in making a love2d shmup game and I am grateful to them!
  • Burning Silvergun is a very cool Touhou game jam game. I used their method of adapting the Playmat Mode 7 library to make the scrolling background. 
  • Demonizer is a real deal Video Game on Steam and I was pleasantly surprised that they generously include the .love file (aka the source) in the itch.io purchase. While I don't think I implemented any patterns specific to this game (I'm still a lil 😵‍💫 about using events and lua coroutines and metatable magic in love2d), it was super helpful to read through the code and learn how it works. It's also an awesome game!
• I am pretty new to the shmups genre (/subculture?) and I really dig it. The first shmup I really dove into and 1CCed was Hazelnut Hex (available on at least Itch, Steam, and Switch), which was the TWG discord's shmup club's October 2024 game. I think it's safe to say that the wonderful art style and game play inspired me. I also looked at games like  Mushihimesama  and  Gradius for e.g. some ideas on enemy/bullet patterns.
• The songs in the game are "Somewhere Else" and "New Floor New Floor" by Kirk Osamayo, which I obtained at Free Music Archive under an Attribution 4.0 International License. I love them. Thank you Kirk!! (I learned of this artist from the many times they have appeared as background music in The Adventure Zone podcast.)
• I drew all the sprites in Procreate using my iPad and Apple Pencil and True Grit brushes/effects. Some of the monsters are based on doodles from some of my journal entries from like 2019. As I enjoy both software development and drawing/painting, a big part of what I like about game dev is that I can do both. I don't know if Procreate has any generative AI art features but I didn't use any from there/anywhere for this project.
• One sprite in the game is based off a watercolor sketch I did a few years ago of an amazing life model named Mar. You can find her on Instagram and linktree. She posted the watercolor here.
• All sound effects were generated with the great https://sfbgames.itch.io/chiptone by me not really knowing what I was doing/clicking around aimlessly.
• I used these open source libraries/files: anim8 (sprite animation),  playmat (Mode7-like background), log, uuid, HC (collision detection),  hump (classes/timers/vectors/etc), and slam (tweaked love2d audio). Special shout out to vrld who developed the latter three; they are quite the love2d hero!
• I used Hot Particles for generating the love2d particle configurations
• I referenced this non-hacky video for drawing the hacky explosion animation
• I used TexturePacker to make sprite sheets out of the images from Procreate.
• My wife came up with the name Lumen Eater <3