Flocking Turrets!!

Control a flock of turrets to destroy the enemy ships.
Turrets of different types will shoot at you in their own way.

Made for GMTK Game Jam 2021 in 48 hours!

Controls

WASD or Arrow keys to move
K or Z to make flocks converge
ENTER to start playing

How to play

Use Arrow keys or WASD to move each flocks' center. Each turret will fly around it, so make sure to learn their behavior and compensate.

Pick-up upgrades to gain extra turrets!

When a turret gets hit, nearby turrets ricochet around the map, and will split into their own flocks if they're too far apart (or recombine if they find others nearby)

Hold K or Z to make each flock fly toward a common center to regroup.

PROTIP: You can still move in any direction while regrouping, use this to steer the center into safer spots

Enemies

Your main baddie is the boss ship, a large warship that will spawn up to 5 turrets. Defeating the boss ship will make you win the game!

Two other ships will come to aid the boss, a single turret ship with very low HP and a Skull-shaped ship with up to 3 turrets which cannot be damaged individually, you'll need to take the whole ship down!

There are 4 types of turrets you will have to fight:

1. Normal turrets fire in a straight pattern, nothing too special.
   
2. Split turrets are also quite easy to understand, they just fire in two directions 90 degrees apart!
   
3. Aim turrets will track a flock and shoot bullets with higher accuracy, you can see them rotate and take aim!
   
4. Medusa turrets shoot special green bullets that will track (up to a point) a specific flock.

Known Bugs

These might happen to you:

• Sometimes all the enemies disappear, this is a game bug and there is no way to fix it without restarting
• The title screen doesn't scale correctly if you resize the window (or maximize it), the rest of the game however is totally fine!
• If you manage to sneak a turret inside/behind an enemy it might mess up their aiming for the rest of the run

Tips

• Focus on the turrets, they can be destroyed and make your life easier with less bullets around.
• When your turrets spin out of control they will clear enemy bullets and still pick up extra upgrades.
• All the enemies will always aim for one specific flock, use this to your advantage if you can get a good position with 2 or more flocks.

Story

After many months of raging war, the Ivol federation is finally on the ropes. The shmup hero was finally launching a solo attack on the Ivol federation headquarters, but against all odds, they were shot down.

"But how? We littered the field with turret power-ups, what did go wrong??" said The General, at the Earth Protection Force monitoring station, where everyone was monitoring and aiding the shmup hero in their mission.

As everyone looked at the general, an engineer shouted "Maybe there's still hope!!", everyone turned into his general direction as he continued saying "The turrets are still programmed to follow a signal when activated, and the nearest one is in range for manual activation! We just need someone to take control of the aiming signal and use the turrets to launch an attack!"

The general seemed relieved, but cautionately asked "So, who's gonna aim this thing?"

"Right now the only option is.. Casey the intern"

You are Casey the intern.

Credits

Sound effects generated via jsfxr (sfxr.me)

Music tracks used:

• "Loop #1", "Loop #5", "Defeat" (8-Bit Action Game Loops) by MuzStation Game Music
• "It’s Always Sunny in the 80s" by Eric Matyas (www.soundimage.org)
• "It’s Raining Pixels" by Eric Matyas (www.soundimage.org)

Fonts:

• m5x7 by Daniel Linssen