Galactea

About the game

You are a little ship alone in space. Your job is to get through three levels packed with enemy ships and beat the boss at the end of the third. The ships come at you across the screen in waves, and the ones you shoot down drop space money; the bigger the enemy, the more coins it leaves behind.

Between the action, a shop lets you turn the coins into a stronger ship: more health, more damage per shot, a faster rate of fire and extra bullets per volley, each in several steps with growing prices. The upgrades are what make the later waves possible, so the game becomes a loop of fighting, collecting and tuning your ship. The authors say it takes about half an hour to finish, and since there is no way to save in the game itself, it is meant to be played in one sitting.

Two friends from Spain made Galactea in a couple of weekends in January 2020 and published it because they liked the result; it was their first finished Arduboy game.

Playing it here

This is a homebrew game made for the Arduboy, the open, credit-card-sized handheld with a tiny black-and-white screen: a new game by independent developers, not a commercial release. It runs here in Ardens, an Arduboy emulator. Click Play now, and the game opens on the shop; leave it with X to start the first level and keep shooting with Z.

The game has no saves of its own, but F2 saves the complete state of the emulated console at any moment and F4 brings it back, which is handy before the boss. A gamepad works too.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Health first. Your first purchases matter most; with more health you can afford to collect coins from the dangerous waves.

Fire rate or multi-shot. Both take a big share of your coins, but the extra bullets per volley make the boss fight much easier.

Take your time. Nothing is lost by waiting at the edge of the screen for the waves to thin out.

Credits and licence

Galactea was made by LordZero-0o and a partner and is free software under the GNU Lesser General Public License version 3. The complete source code of the exact build served here (the game, the Arduboy2 and ArduboyTones libraries and the Arduino AVR core, plus the patch and the script that compile them) is hosted alongside the game. Our only change is a patch to the money you start with: the source began each game with 8000 coins, which looks like a leftover from testing and let you buy every upgrade at once, so it now starts at zero. The licence texts and the patch are linked from this page.