Lasers

About the game

Lasers is an arcade game built around one switch. Laser turrets drift across the screen, each one firing a long beam that slowly rotates, and every beam is either white or black. You are a small orb that can be either colour too, and you can flip between them at any moment.

A beam of your own colour is harmless: you absorb it, and each one you take adds to your score. A beam of the other colour drains your power. So the game is never just about dodging; it is about being the right colour at the right time, often with beams of both colours crossing the same spot. When your power is gone, the game ends and the score is how much light you managed to absorb.

The idea of a hero who changes polarity to absorb matching fire is a well-known one in shoot-'em-ups, and OBONO boiled it down to its core here, with no shooting at all.

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 an independent developer, not a commercial release. It runs here in Ardens, an Arduboy emulator. Click Play now and use the menu on the title screen.

Photosensitivity warning: the game draws grey tones by making the screen flicker very rapidly, and it opens with the author's own warning that this may cause discomfort and trigger epileptic seizures. Scroll the warning down and press X to accept it. If flickering lights affect you, do not play.

The game remembers its records in the emulated memory of the Arduboy, and that is kept in this browser automatically. F2 also saves the complete state of the game at any moment, and F4 brings it back. A gamepad works too.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Look at the beam, not the turret. The beams are long and they rotate, so the danger is wherever the line will sweep next, not where the turret is.

Switching is your shield. Instead of running from a beam, it is often safer to change colour and let it pass through you, and it scores.

Mixed colours are the real threat. When a white and a black beam meet near you, pick the colour of the one that will hit first and move out of the other.

Credits and licence

Lasers was designed, programmed, drawn and scored by OBONO, who has been making small games for the Arduboy since 2016. It is free software under the MIT licence. It is built with the Arduboy 1.1.1 library (BSD licence, with music code by Len Shustek under the MIT licence). The licence texts are linked from this page, and the source code is in the author's ArduboyWorks repository.