Accidental Alien Attack!
An alien is visiting your planet on holiday, but their drone swarm seems to have run amok! Do yourself a favour and blow those malfunctioning machines up before they do some real damage!
Activate powerups, earn special weapons, and shoot for a high score!
Controls
(All controls use the TIC-80 button names.)
In menus
| Button | Function |
|---|---|
| D-Pad | Navigation |
| A | Accept |
| B | Back |
In game
| Button | Function |
|---|---|
| D-Pad | Movement |
| A | Fire |
| B | Use special weapon |
| X | Pause |
About
Accidental Alien Attack is the first game that I have developed to the point where I consider it to be “complete”. It is feature complete, contains accessibility options, and has around half an hour of gameplay before finishing.
I started working on AAA (pronounced by screaming) as a way to entertain myself during my Christmas holiday in 2021. I knew that I would be staying with my parents for a while during the festive season and I wanted a creative outlet that I could work on using either paper or my old laptop. Having participated in a couple of game jams that year to disappointing results, I decided that I would embark on a new game dev project at my own pace with the intention of creating something that was at least a bit polished.
To keep the scope manageable (and make sure my laptop could run the dev tools well), I decided to make my game for a fantasy console. The most famous of these would be the Pico-8, but I decided to use TIC-80 purely because I had the option of customising the colour palette!
Strange though it might seem, I found the limited API of the TIC-80 to be liberating. For example: I cannot tell you how many hours I have spent fighting Unity’s animation timeline when all I wanted to do was import a sprite sheet. My projects do not leverage the full power of Unity’s animation tools, but they are beholden to the complexity of said tools. In comparison, whilst I had to write my animation library myself in TIC-80, I could make it exactly as complicated as it needed to be - which was “not very”.
I would like to create another game in a fantasy console in the future, but it remains to be seen whether it will beat out one of my other ideas that require a proper 3D engine.
You can check out the source code here: Kyratech / Accidental Alien Attack.