Go Beryllium! (Free 2D shmup about an atom)

monoRAIL

Hello Arcadians - please take a look at my new game: Go Beryllium!
It's a 2D bullet-hell shmup created with Torque Game Builder featuring sub-atomic combat with synchronized sound effects and music. It supports Xbox 360 analog controls (or any other analog gamepad) and has an online high score table.

Fans of the Large Hadron Collider may recognize some of the later bosses in the game o_O
As if that wasn't geeky enough already, I've also released the source code, for those of you who enjoy reading code.

Download the game here

Trailer on YouTube Gameplay video showing powerups

Go Beryllium finished first in the Eegra.com First Annual Game Makin' Shindig!



Screenshots:



Online Leaderboard

Source Code (written in Torque Script for Torque Game Builder)

Cantido

I was thinking of something like this...

The Touhou Project games have a feature I've never seen more common shumps use, which is drawing the fucking hitbox. This leads to such bullet heavy sequences, you are constantly starting at the hitbox to the point that your character doesn't matter anymore.

And lo and behold, there is now a shump where you play as a hitbox.

monoRAIL

Actually the hitbox in this game is also very small - it's the central neutron in the Beryllium atom's nucleus:



And your bullets are photons, emitted by your orbiting electrons. Naturally.

cjeris

This game is an awesome feat of nerdiness. But on my machine (a Core 2 Duo laptop, about 15 months old, with an ATI Fire GL graphics chip) it is rendered unplayable by slowdown, where by "slowdown" I mean "grinding to a complete halt for seconds at a time when large numbers of particles enter".

Meiz

Looks great but I can play shmups that start me off at level "FUCK!"

monoRAIL

Meiz - There's an easy mode with fewer enemies and slower bullets, for shmup n00bs. Those videos are showing hard mode. If you can score a million in geometry wars you'll have no trouble beating this game.

cjeris - your computer should be powerful enough to play this. It runs fine on my 2 year old dell laptop with ATI radeon mobility video. Are you running any other programs in the background? Does your machine run other openGL games ok?

Ah_Pook

whoa this looks great, thanks

Frem

I downloaded this a few days ago, and have been meaning to boot into windows to try it. The youtubeage looks fantastic, and the extended period without new Kenta Cho-ness has left me short on vitamin S(hmup).

monoRAIL

Frem - I believe Kenta Cho's been working with XNA recently. Maybe he's going to make an Xbox game.

smokealbert

As a nuclear physicist by profession (no, really) and long time shmup fan, it's almost like you made this game just for me.

I salute you for your awesome

Ranced

Looks like a game that could be on XBLA or PSN.

Zilla360

This is great. Sequel should be Thorium.

juice for jesus

Needs Bismuth as a playable element.

Sueve

your the dude who made Harpooned!

MechMantis

What about a prequel?


Helium

monoRAIL

smokealbert - hope you like the game, you're probably the only person who will actually get all the extremely geeky science references in there. (The neutrinos pass through normal matter, and the nucleons really decay into the correct number of red, green and blue quarks!)

Ranced - thanks, I may port it to other platforms soon ;-)

Zilla - Thorium is way further down the periodic table, it would be a sequel to this!

Sueve - that's right, that's me. Watch out for the 2009 update to Harpooned, coming soon.

MechMantis - helium are popcorn enemies (to use the shmup terminology), it doesn't deserve a game of it's own!

MechMantis

I know this.


But you need a prequel with a smaller atom just because.


And then after the final boss it fuses and becomes Beryllium.

zimfan

I love how your actions make sounds that go had in hand with the music

Meiz

Yeah, easy is more like "Oh SHI-"

artoo

What did you blow the prize money on? :P

Simon Moon

I dig the music.

monoRAIL

artoo - I'm waiting for Garage Games to release their Torque engine for iPhone, then I'm going to blow my winnings on that, and iPhone and a Mac Mini and port Go Beryllium to the iPhone :-)

artoo

monoRAIL wrote: »

artoo - I'm waiting for Garage Games to release their Torque engine for iPhone, then I'm going to blow my winnings on that, and iPhone and a Mac Mini and port Go Beryllium to the iPhone :-)

I'd love to see that! Congrats on the great game. :^:

Darklyre

juice for jesus wrote: »

Needs Bismuth as a playable element.

BISMUTH FUCK YEAH

Also, this is pretty darn neet.

TheGuero

I really like this game. Short and sweet.

monoRAIL

I see someone's just scored over 1000 points on the leaderboard! I'm impressed whoever that is - I didn't think anyone could score that high. I've only been able to get 900 myself, so I guess I've been beaten at my own game!

Ah_Pook

fun game but i dont really like the bomb mechanic personally. also it likes to just hang my computer occasionally mid game and then pop forward to a game over screen. dont know what the hell its doing to use that many resources but whatever. the style, music, challenge etc are all sweet, thanks again for the game man.

monoRAIL

Ah_Pook - that stuttering is probably some background program taking focus from the game for a second, causing you to die. Unfortunately there's not much I can do about this, it's just an issue with Torque Game Builder I think. Try closing down any background processes before playing.

Are you using the bomb in time to the music - it's much more effective when you hit it exactly on the beat.