Ville Kallio, creator of cult hit FPS Cruelty Squad, has been posting progress updates on his next game, an as-of-yet untitled shoot-’em-up highly reminiscent of the 2001 classic Ikaruga.
The project seems to have moved past basic programming and groundwork to the implementation of backgrounds, the player sprite, projectiles, and UI. You take control of a fighter jet and have full movement around a portrait-oriented play area, with the HUD and semi-static art on the right and left sides of the screen. Kallio has yet to implement the game’s enemies, and is instead focusing on putting together a baseline of art and simple mechanics so far.
Despite the shift in genre from Cruelty Squad, Kallio’s distinctive style still comes through, especially in the art that sits on either side of the screen. You can see a character with a partially-implemented text box on the right, perhaps a friendly NPC or mission control, and the left half of the screen features what appears to be your fighter’s dashboard, with some manner of throttle or reload mechanism factoring into the gameplay.
Kallio’s made a lot of progress on the game in the past month, but it’s unclear when the project will release or how complex it will end up being. In his first tweet about the game, Kallio indicated that this would be a deliberately simple project to gain familiarity with the raylib programming library. Still, it’s exciting to see the creator of one of 2021’s standout games already showing off what’s next, and I’m looking forward to seeing his take on a different genre.