I wanted to go to bed, but somehow my brain thought of this change, and I couldn't fall asleep without letting this out of my system by implementing it.
This is a Kaboom! clone with anime girls that nobody asked for. I started this as a side project while I was stuck with different phases of building Miromina. This was built upon an exercise I made from the Nerdy Teachers' tutorial game Fruit Drop.
The player begins with three lives, which are represented with the three baskets and it just stacks up if they can earn extra lives. All baskets have collision, so it's possible to sweep across the screen and catch bombs from either side of the basket stack, and that's the intended design. The bombs will be clustered around the center in the early levels, but they'll get more randomly scattered and faster. When the player loses a life by missing a bomb, the game will clear the current bombs and start a new wave with the randomness and speed scaled back a little. Extra lives are given at fixed score points.
At first I wasn't really sure if I wanted to publish it since it is a beginner exercise staple after all and you've all seen different interpretations of the Kaboom! formula, so to give more of a character to this cart, I added a story progression featuring pixellated anime girls. The cutscenes will appear at the beginning of the game and as the player reaches 500, 1000 and 1500 points, and after each cutscene the girl who appears on the top right will change.
The original plan was to make the girl move and drop bombs like the mad bomber in Kaboom!, but despite my best efforts I couldn't make it in 32x32, so I just decided to keep them stationary so they don't look like they have missing body parts when moving at least. While not intentional, it turned out not to be too bad since I can then spawn bombs from y=0 and that gives 32 more frames for the player to react to new bombs.
