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MainFighter
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About the game
MainFighter is a rail shooter in the style of the arcade games that faked 3D with scaled sprites. Your fighter flies forward over a striped green plain with snowy mountains on the horizon, and the enemies come at you out of the distance, growing as they approach. You cannot stop or turn; you can only slide around the screen, line up the crosshair and fire.
The mission is a single long battle. Forty-nine TriWing drones arrive a few at a time, weaving and shooting back, and once they are gone their flagship, the Mega-TriWing, takes the field. It is far tougher than the drones and fires more often. A counter at the top of the screen shows how many enemies are left. Every hit you take drains your HP bar; when it is empty the run is over.
Your gun runs on the EN bar at the bottom right. Each shot uses part of it and it refills on its own, so holding the trigger down soon leaves you with nothing. The story, told in a short briefing before take-off, is a bet: a robot called Droid X2 claims you will never be the main character of a video game, and the only way to prove him wrong is to beat all of his drones.
Playing it here
MainFighter was made for TIC-80, a fantasy console: an imaginary 1980s-style computer with a 240 by 136 screen and 16 colours, for which independent developers write new games. Nalquas first made it for a game jam in 2017 and this is version 1.1, from December 2018. It runs here in the official TIC-80 web player. Click Play, press Z after the warning, then Z again on "Start a new run".
Photosensitivity warning: the game opens with an epilepsy warning of its own. The intro and the menu have broad stripes scrolling across the whole screen, and the ground stripes keep rushing by during play.
The menu also lets you invert the vertical controls, and that choice is saved in this browser. Esc opens the TIC-80 menu. A gamepad works directly, and on touch screens an on-screen D-pad and buttons appear. The game is in English.
Controls
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| Arrow keys | steer the fighter |
| Z (A button) | fire; continue after the warning; start the mission after the briefing |
| X (B button) | skip the briefing |
| Up / Down (menus) | choose an option |
| Z (menus) | confirm |
| Esc | TIC-80 menu |
A few things worth knowing
Watch the EN bar. Firing costs energy and the bar refills steadily, so a steady rhythm of shots does better than holding the button. Save some for the moment a drone lines up with your crosshair.
Keep moving. The drones aim at where you are, and their shots grow on the way in just like they do. Sliding sideways or up and down is usually enough to make them miss.
The flagship needs patience. One shot downs a drone, but the Mega-TriWing takes dozens. Stay out of its line of fire and chip away at it.
Inverted flight. Players used to flight sticks can choose "Invert Y-Axis" on the menu, so that Up dives and Down climbs.
Credits and licence
MainFighter was made by Niklas Freund, known as Nalquas, who wrote the code and made the graphics, the music and the sound effects. It is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later. The cartridge served here is the one from version 1.1 on his GitHub, and it holds the game's complete, readable code and assets; his repository at that release is hosted alongside it. It runs here in the TIC-80 web player (MIT licence). The licence text and the source code are linked from this page.