You've managed to steal valuable technology from a top-secret research output deep within enemy territory, but at a great cost; your advanced stealth craft only has ten seconds of hyperdrive fuel left; not enough for a jump.

What's worse is that the enemy knows you are here and is sending powerful combat ships to intercept you. You will need to break through in order to return this valuable technology to Earth.

Controls (redefinable):
Cursor keys: Move
Z: Fire
X: Engage hyperdrive
Shift: Focus
Ctrl-Alt-Enter: Fullscreen (for the non-web version)

Successful use of your remaining hyperdrive fuel is key to your success. While you cannot engage in a hyperspace jump, you can temporarily shift into inverse space, allowing you to temporarily avoid destruction. However, you can only engage it for a total of ten seconds before you run out of fuel.

The energy requirements to keep the hyperdrive fuel stable on such a small ship means that most of your weapons systems are locked down while the fuel is present. Conversely, the more hyperdrive fuel you use up, the more powerful your ship's arsenal will become.

Effectively, the hyperdrive fuel timer is the game's score, lives, and rank streamlined into a single value. When you run out of fuel, your ship can be destroyed in a single hit. When your remaining fuel is high, the game is more difficult. You can continue the game from any level with the remaining hyperdrive fuel from your best attempt. But only if you complete the game in one shot will you get to face the true final battle.


(日本語は無理です、ごめんなさい)

敵陣の奥深くにある極秘研究施設から貴重な技術を盗み出すことに成功したが、その代償は大きく、高度なステルス機にはハイパードライブの燃料が10秒しか残っておらず、ジャンプには不十分だった。

さらに悪いことに、敵は君たちがここにいることを知っていて、強力な戦闘艦を送り込んで妨害している。この貴重な技術を地球に返還するために、突破しなければならないのだ。

操作:

矢印キー:移動

Zキー:ショット

Xキー:ハイパードライブ

Shiftキー:フォーカス

Ctrl+Alt+Enter:フルスクリーン (Web版以外)

残りのハイパードライブ燃料をうまく使うことが成功のカギとなる。ハイパースペースジャンプはできないが、一時的に逆空間にシフトすることができ、一時的に破壊を回避することができる。ただし、燃料がなくなるまで合計10秒しか交わせない。

このような小さな船でハイパードライブ燃料を安定させるために必要なエネルギーは、燃料が存在する間はほとんどの武器システムがロックされていることを意味する。逆に言えば、ハイパードライブ燃料を使い切れば使い切るほど、あなたの船の兵器庫はより強力になる。

ハイパードライブ燃料タイマーは、ゲームのスコア、ライフ、ランクを1つの数値にまとめたようなものです。燃料がなくなると、自機が一撃で破壊されることもある。燃料の残量が多いほど、ゲームの難易度は高くなります。ハイパードライブ燃料の残りがあれば、どのレベルからでもゲームを続けることができます。しかし、一発でゲームをクリアした場合のみ、真の最終決戦に臨むことができるのです。

Credits:
Maxim generously drew most of the enemy ships and created the PC speaker sound effects. The rest of the game (barring assets listed below) was created by Mahou Shoujo ☆ Magical Moestar.

Attributions:
Music (c) SENTIVE: free0514.ogg, free0602.ogg, free0607.ogg, free0618.ogg
(c) Music Palette: bgm_323.ogg
(c) TAM Music Factory: Galaxy.ogg, tamhe11.ogg
I used this CC0 explosion sprite, with B&W dithering and some cleanup.
The font used in many parts of the game is Stellar Kombat by Joiro Hatgaya.
The game engine used is MegaZeux. The source tarball is included in the Win64 download (it contains a couple of very small modifications to the original engine. These modifications were generously made by Lachesis.

Download

Download
pandemonium-buster-v1.1-win64.zip 19 MB

Install instructions

To run the standalone Windows 64-bit version, extract the contents of the ZIP somewhere and run mzxrun.exe. If you are on a non-Windows platform, go to DigitalMZX and download a version of MegaZeux for your platform. You can then use this to play the files in the Windows 64-bit ZIP.

Development log

Comments

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a vertical stg game using horizontal landscape? bad idea

I guess Star Soldier, Twinbee, Aleste, and Zanac are no good either, then.

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I am pretty sure you are be able tell the difference between 16:9 and 4:3 display. 

Overall a great game though

(+1)

I loved the spaceship design in this game. Unfortunately the game itself was too hard for me to get past stage 4, and I got to enjoy the rest of spaceships from the video :D

(+1)

What a fantastic bullet hell with killer art and audio to boot. Brilliant work.

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Dope game. Some attacks might need some tweaking I think to make what is going on a bit more visually understandable, but I had a lot of fun with it. Especially the background comets or whatever they are can make it very difficult to distinguish between what is a projectile and what isn't. 

Had so much fun with this one! Beautiful sprite work and a lot of novelty in the pattern design that I haven't seen before!