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Solar Guard
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About the game
Solar Guard is a space shooter where the ship keeps its momentum: you turn it, fire the engine to build speed and brake to stop, so flying well matters as much as aiming. You choose from eight ships, each with its own speed, turning rate, shield, fuel and gun and a stat screen that shows how they compare, then take one of five missions in the Solar System. They go from destroying orbital space junk, to escorting a transport, repelling pirates, scouting a pirate base and rescuing survivors in the outer reaches.
Your engine heats up when you push it and your gun runs on a limited energy supply, so both need cooling. The screen shows speed, fuel, shield and hull, a radar and a map of the mission area. There is a briefing before each mission, an information screen about the ships and a music player with the whole soundtrack.
Playing it here
This is a homebrew game made for the Game Boy Advance: a new game by an independent developer, not a commercial release. It runs here in mGBA, a Game Boy Advance emulator compiled to WebAssembly. Click Play now, wait for the splash screens and press Enter at "Press START". F2 saves the emulator state in this browser and F4 brings it back. The game is 3.6 MB.
Controls
| Key | GBA button | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Left / Right arrows | Control Pad | turn the ship; move in menus |
| S | R | engine (forward thrust) |
| A | L | brake; with S held, reverse |
| X | A | fire the laser; confirm |
| Z | B | back in menus |
| Enter | Start | start; pause |
A few things worth knowing
Do not hold the engine all the time. It overheats, and a hot engine stops until it cools down. Burn in bursts.
Brake before you turn to shoot. Drifting at speed makes the target slide past.
Watch the gun energy. Short bursts keep the laser from running dry at the wrong moment.
Credits and licence
Solar Guard is by Deft Spade, made for the GBA Jam 2021 with the Butano engine. Code and original assets are under the GNU General Public License version 3, and the music is the author's own, composed in Beepbox. Third-party art, as credited by the author: planet backgrounds by ArthCarvalho (OGA-BY 3.0); spaceships by Eikester, nareiK and MillionthVector (CC BY 3.0) and by Skorpio (CC BY-SA 3.0 and GPL 3.0); a brown asteroid by FunwithPixels (CC BY 4.0 and others); the grid HUD by Ivan Voirol (CC BY 3.0); a solar system picture by ShinyOgre (CC BY-SA 3.0); a space carrier by NaksRifati, spaceships by Rawdanitsu, asteroids and debris by The_Scientist___ and a font by Pixel-boy (all CC0); and an asteroid belt diagram by NASA (public domain). The author does not publish a ready-made ROM, so the one served here was compiled from the project source code. We left out the opening screen with the jam's logo and replaced the instrument sounds of the music, whose sources have no licence on record, with simple synthesized ones: the notes are the author's and the timbre is different. The complete source code of what is served is hosted next to the game, and the licence text is linked from this page.