You awaken as the AI of an ancient, orbital ion cannon. The distress call from someone on the planet’s surface has reached you, but will it lead to their salvation or doom?
This is my submission for the Fantasy Console Game Jam (#fc_jam) which took place during July 2017. I got to know about it from my local gamedev community and decided to try out the game engine, game editor and fantasy console Pico-8 which I’ve heard and seen much good about and from for a while now. Was a pretty fun experience, and it’s not a bad tool if you want to prototype game ideas with some serious design limitations to avoid getting stuck with feature creeping and over designing. Having all code in one single file and writing inside and editor which is 128 pixels wide did get kind of annoying after a while though, I’m not a huge lua fan neither.
The jam theme was union, I choose to play with the word and interpret it as “un-ion”, whereafter I made a top-down shooter game where the player controlls an ion-cannon with artillery style gameplay. I did not spend loads of time on balanced gameplay but instead left the purpose of the player a bit vague, as one can choose to shoot the innocent civilians or the attacking robots, returning a bit to the theme.