GunTneR

About the game

GunTneR is a side-scrolling shoot 'em up with a deadline. A tearful alien has talked you into an unpaid errand: fly its very sick pet, a dingle, to the life-saving medicine waiting on the far side of the galaxy. The quickest route is a wormhole shortcut known as the 13th dimension, where the stars streak into a blur and every odd creature imaginable comes at your ship, the Rudy.

The trip is split into 60 phases. Each phase sends a set of enemies, and clearing all of them moves you on to the next. There are 16 kinds of enemy to shoot, from harmless flapping birds to formations that fire back and drifting gun turrets, plus four bosses along the way. Friendly creatures called Starglasses cheer you on and leave power-ups behind when you hit them.

A clock runs at the bottom of the screen the whole time, and it matters: the veterinarian at the end of the journey can only help if you get there fast enough. How long you take decides which of the three endings you see.

The game began as an entry in the 2020–21 NESDev Competition and kept growing through several updates. It fits in 24 kilobytes, about the size of an early NES cartridge.

Playing it here

This is a homebrew game made for the NES: a new game by an independent developer, not a commercial release. It runs here in jsnes, an NES emulator written in JavaScript. Click Play, choose Please START on the title screen and press Start.

Much Options, the other item on the title screen, has a song and sound test, two colour settings for your ship and four difficulty levels, the toughest being A-OK #1 Expert.

F2 saves the current state of the game in this browser and F4 brings it back. A gamepad also works.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Read the dashboard. The panel at the bottom shows your speed setting, the shield meter, your lives, the phase number and the clock. The hexadecimal digits in the middle show the enemies left in the phase, your kill count and your position.

Pick a speed. Select steps the Rudy through four speeds. A slow ship is easier to thread between bullets, a fast one gets out of trouble quicker.

Rapid fire has a price. Holding A sprays shots, but every burst eats into the shield, and losing the shield costs a life. The shield refills slowly on its own, so use the rapid fire in short bursts and lean on B the rest of the time. It is not available in the very first phase.

Grab the power-ups. Batteries refill the shield, the bomb clears the screen, the mushroom makes you briefly invincible, so rapid fire costs nothing, the R bag speeds up your shots, the skull shield circles your ship and protects you, and there are extra lives too. Shooting a power-up nudges it back, which keeps it on screen a little longer. Watch out: one of the bosses throws hazards disguised as power-ups.

Mind the clock. Reach the end in under ten minutes for the happiest ending. Between ten and fifteen minutes the dingle pulls through only just, and any slower and the vet has bad news.

Secrets from the manual. Entering Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start on the title screen starts the game with 32 lives. Finishing the game once unlocks Boundless Mode, which frees the ship to fly anywhere on screen; you can also turn it on by holding Select while pressing Start on the title screen.

Credits and licence

GunTneR is by LoBlast (langel on GitHub). The whole project, including the source code, the art files and the music, is released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. The ROM served here is version 1.3, unchanged, as the author publishes it on itch.io, where you can also download it and its illustrated manual on a name-your-own-price basis. The source code is in the author's repository at github.com/langel/guntner. The full licence text is in the licence file.