Rarebit SHMUP

Story: After eating too much cheese before bed, Jack Colby has a nightmare about cheese. Destroy or evade the cheese and make it to the end!

Controls: Analog joystick or WASD or arrows to move. Gamepad button or space to fire.

Development:

Mac and Linux distributables have not been tested. Browser version lacks audio until you click on the game window with your mouse.

Rarebit SHMUP was a project developed over the last week in August 2024 by solo dev Michael Coorlim. The initial goal was to make something vaguely resembling the gameplay found in 80s shooters like gradius and r-type, though the scope didn't ultimately allow for power-ups or a boss.

Why is it about cheese? Well, in the early 20th century there was a belief that eating toasted cheese before bed would give you strange dreams - so much so that Winsor McCay launched a newspaper comic called "Dream of the Rarebit Fiend" about these strange dreams in 1904 - Welsh Rarebit being cheese on toast. Seemed like a decent enough topic for a game, and my limited pixel art skills do allow for the drawing of cheese.

Code, art, design, etc all by me.

Music is "8-bit Chill" by Antti Luode, used under CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

If I were to expand the game into a full commercial product I'd probably create custom SFX, commission a score from a musician, and maybe hire an actual pixel artist to improve on the visuals. I'd either add more stages or greatly expand the current one with a checkpoint system and mini-bosses, and add more terrain/tilemaps. I'd add more enemy types, power-ups, and possibly cutscenes.

Will that happen? Maybe. I'm going to do a bunch of week-long games like this and see what people respond to. If you'd like to support the project, you can do so on Patreon http://www.patreon.com/mcoorlim or Comdradery https://comradery.co/mcoorlim which is like Patreon but a co-op that doesn't take venture capital money.