Plot

Antsy Alien Attack Pico is a juicy retro-style vertically scrolling shoot 'em up. It is my love letter 💌 to the shmups I played in the arcades in the '80s and '90s 🕹️ and my entry to Linux Game Jam 2023 🐧

The year is 2139. Planet Earth is under attack by aliens, and they're (still) antsy!

Objective

 You're a mercenary with a state-of-the-art space fighter and a gun for hire
 The United Federation of Planet Earth has hired you to dispatch the aliens and restore calm
 Complete every mission to fulfil your contract and earn your pay

One ship. One life. One mission.

💥 Destroy aliens by shooting or colliding with them
🛸️ Avoid the aliens if you can't destroy them
🔋 Collect power-ups to enhance your weapons and charge the ship dynamo
🛡️ A fully charged dynamo boosts ship health by 50%
🛑 Weapons go offline when travelling at hyperspeed
🌌 When your health is depleted, you're lost to the vacuum of space

Controls 

Antsy Alien Attack Pico should work with most game controllers  The in-game visuals show the PICO-8 buttons, but the following shows the equivalent buttons for Xbox controllers.

Action	Button / Stick
Move
Fire
Fire

1-UP Keyboard 

Action	Key(s)
Left
Right
Up
Down
Fire
Fire

2-UP Keyboard 

Action	Key(s)
Left
Right
Up
Down
Fire
Fire

Game design 

Antsy Alien Attack Pico is a "sequel" to Antsy Alien Attack. Antsy Alien Attack Pico was developed during Linux Game Jam 2023  using PICO-8. I've been looking for an excuse to learn PICO-8 and this is it!

• 🪵 DevLog
• 🐙 GitHub - All the plans and game design details

Credits  & Licenses 

A big "Thank you!" to everyone below who contributed to making Antsy Alien Attack Pico during the game jam. Antsy Alien Attack Pico would have been boring shapes and silence had it not been for these fine people:

The game code is licensed under the MIT license, and all game assets are licensed using CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0. As I'm using assets from other creators, and they use the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license, the few SFX and sprites I created are also released under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 to keep things simple.

• The player ship is from Krystian Majewski [CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0]
• Most of the other sprites are created by Alice Masters [CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0]
• All the music is from Gruber [CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0]
• Most of the SFX are from Gruber [CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0]