Infinite Prime

Final Release!!!
Infinite Prime aims to be a casual retro-inspired, nostalgia-inducing plat-former game. It does so by combining those familiar platforming mechanics and pixel-art graphics with some retro-game references, plenty of random elements and a really solid game-feel. Supports Gamepad, and keyboard, and is supported on Windows only.

Story
The story is, your team of 5 space-heroes has arrived at planet prime to save the galaxy from an evil cyborg named Infinite Prime. Prime is building a super weapon to destroy your galaxy, and you have to stop him. As you search for Prime you’ll meet face to face with his army of thugs, and vile creatures. Along your quest you’ll meet agents of the galactic federation who give you game-play tips and reveal the story in a fun way that will never slow down your progress.

Characters
As you start the game you can choose from 5 characters, each with their own set of perks like additional regeneration abilities, increased attack power, and high jump. You can switch between these characters at-will during your quest either for fun, or to ease your passage through certain places.

Weapons
You primary weapons in the game are a laser/blaster gun and grenades. Collect blaster power-ups to temporarily enable heat-seeking and larger blasts from your blaster. Grenades regenerate slowly but can be collected from enemies when they perish. Managing your ammo level is important as you’ll need grenades to shoot straight up or down, because your blaster shoots straight or diagonals. This mechanic helps to balance the game-play. Thankfully when the heat-seeker kicks in you can quickly dispatch a whole room of baddies.

Enemies
You wouldn’t need those powerful weapons if the enemies weren’t challenging to deal with. You’ll fight jet-pack thugs, giant bugs, aliens gunners, tough guys with shields, and two pixel art bosses that might just have you throwing your controller across the room.

Platforming
The platforming in the game is quite challenging at times, as well. Levels include instant-kill spikes, and tricky passages where you one stray bullet could easily knock you off a platform to your death. Pattern memorization is key to continue your progress. You won’t worry much about dying because there are infinite lives, and the game auto-saves as you complete each small section. It’s more of a chuckle and smile when you die, feeling more like those tricky Mario Bros levels where you really have to memorize the patterns. You will definitely die a few times until you’ve memorized the rooms and the patterns.

Controls
The game has full game-pad support including rumble/vibrations. The game also supports keyboard only, and keyboard + mouse configurations. There are multiple keyboard keys setup for certain actions to allow better use of the mouse+keyboard option. You’ll find yourself happiest mashing away at the fire button on it your Game-pad, making it the preferred control scheme. The game-pad mappings can be turned off if you’d like to use a third party tool to remap the buttons. (we recommend joyToKey) In the full release I do plan to include a in-game customization of the game-pad layout.

Level design
The bright and colorful level designs draw a lot of inspiration from old classic NES titles like megaman, metroid, mario, kirby, kid icarus, but with the gameplay feeling probably closest to megaman. (™) Each section aims to be short enough to complete in 30 seconds to a minute, but may require a handful of tries to clear. There are destructable walls and hidden energy cells and power-up items to find which works well to enhance the feeling of character progression. Item shops allow you to purchase potions or upgrades to progress your character.

Music and Audio: As both an audiophile and a musician it’s been a really great experience for me to build the audio for this game. The soundtrack is chiptune and electronic and varies quite a bit from scene to scene in the game. If that’s not your thing, music can be turned off from the pause menu in the game. The sound FX are also a mix of synth and chiptune based sounds which makes for a fun and nostalgic experience. I’ve used an app called Caustic to create some music tracks but primarily I’ve been working with the pocket operator PO20 arcade synthesizer made by teenage engineering. It’s a crazy little chiptune synth that’s the size of a mini calculator! As an avid guitar player I’ve also been working on some guitar audio to sneak into the Easter egg areas before the game’s full release in December. These tracks will be blues and psychedelic rock influenced but I wouldn’t count out some slammin’ metal riffs for additional boss battles.

Difficulty levels
The game is quite challenging for me on normal, but I consider myself an average player. The game includes a normal and an ‘insane’ difficulty level in which you start with less energy and grenade storage, and there are more enemies to deal with. In ‘insane’ mode grenade-storage upgrades give fewer buffs, and regeneration is slightly slower than in normal. The difficulty can also be modified slightly by character selection which helps to enhance the variability of the challenge in both settings. For instance if you play as the Old Man you’ll have faster regen and enhanced blaster range and power. Whereas if you play as the Bird, he has no regeneration. A Ninja and an Elf both with high jump are playable as well. The main character Storm is the default has standard jump, blaster, and regen.

Random Elements
To keep things fresh on each play-through the sections of each zone appear in random order as you traverse through portals on planet prime. Enemies randomly drop health, ammo, or gems which can be used to purchase permanent upgrades or health potions that kick in right when you need them to. Enemies themselves are somewhat randomized as their placement may vary from one visit to another within a section. This means you may get a favorable pattern over an unfavorable one after you die and re-spawn. This is especially meaningful for spike-traps that move around and can instantly kill you as you try to sneak past them. When you revisit the room the trap that killed you might not be there at all, or maybe it’s in a different spot now, either way probably a good thing.

Collectibles!
Late in development I added some cool collectibles, see if you can find them all!  
These include a Doom floppy disk, a bag of marbles, and more... 

Kill or Save the Innocents
In the final release I added the ability to kill or save the innocents in the game. Does this have any effect on the gameplay or the ending? You'll just have to play it through a few times to find out! 

Easter Eggs
Yes, there are some funny Easter eggs in the game. Happy Hunting! 
There is even a God mode, but I can't tell you how to turn it on, that would be cheating. You might recognize some serious nods to the old 'NES' retro gaming era, keep an eye out for it. 

Speed-run Timer and High score tracking
I’ve created a no-progress-loss speed run timer built into the game. This means that if you die in a section, you’ll re-spawn at the beginning of the section and the timer will rewind back to the moment you entered the section. Knowing that games are often speed-run I felt this was a great feature to implement to help people work on their times without stressing about having to restart the whole game each time. The game also has a score system, and stores your high score locally on your computer. For the full release I intend to implement a web-server to track the top high scores and speed run times to be displayed in-game and also on the website.

Plans for the future
Final Release! It's done! or is it? 
I didn't quite get a chance to implement everything I wanted to for this game because it just became way too much work, and my day job has taken over a lot of my free time but... I learned a TON of things about building games in the process, and I can promise that my next one will be even better, but for now this game is pretty fun, and has some value, so I'm releasing it as is, and have no plans to continue development on it. 

Sequels and Follow-ups
Maybe?  I can't be sure. I do plan to make more games some day, but I may favor a different engine, game-style, or approach. I'm thinking my next game will be substantially more simple than this, and I will try to limit the scope and create something that's procedurally generated instead of lots of hard coding,  with variation and randomization mixed in. 

Thank You
A very special thanks to you, for taking an interest in the game, playing it, or providing your input and support of the development. Without you, it’s pretty pointless to make a game., but more than that… Knowing that players are enjoying my game gives my life purpose and meaning. I’ve put literally hundreds of hours into this, and I really hope that people enjoy it.

Download
Please check it out, and let me know what you think about the game!
Thanks so much!