Always Surrender
Cover art
| Developer: | The Covert Sheep Example |
|---|---|
| Music: | Abstraction |
| Program: | Jonathan Edwards |
| Art: | Jonathan Edwards |
| Release date: | 29 January 2024 |
Always Surrender is a vertically scrolling score chasing shoot-em-up developed by The Covert Sheep Example released, via Steam, for Windows in 2024. The idea in the main modes is to push your luck as far as possible before giving up to bank an ever increasing bonus. It is designed to be a quick game to play, with little down time, and a short ramp up time.
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Contents
Gameplay Overview
Controls
- Keyboard/Controller
- Z/A: Fire
- C/X: Surrender/bomb
- X/B: Slow Mo
- Shift/RB: Focus - halves the player movement speed and doubles the rate of fire
- Escape/Start: Pause
General Mechanics
Shooting enemies increases the score, while a bonus score continuously accumulates. Killing an enemy also releases a medal, which increases the multiplier on collection. Medals can be attracted to the player by stopping firing for a short period of time and once the vacuum effect has begun firing does not interrupt it.
The bonus score can be banked by surrendering, setting off a bomb to kill all enemies and ending the game.
A slow-mo system is in place that can be manually activated with a button press, or automically when the option is set to "on" on the main menu. When auto slowmo is on there is a small circle around the player that will activate slowmo when an enemy or enemy bullet enters it. While the game is slowed down the player is invincible, however the amount of time before slow-mo can be used again. This cooldown can be reduced by not using slowmo for a period of time while it is ready to be used.
The player's hitbox is center of the red pixels on the player's ship, and is 1x1 pixel in size.
The game doesn't follow a fixed pattern, however there is a tournament mode setting to fix the randomness if needed. High scores can't be set while tournament mode is on.
Modes
- Novice/Normal: In these modes you have one life to score as much as possible, and scoring follows the general mechanics. One surrender is available to end the game with and bank the bonus score. Failing to surrender loses the bonus score.
- Timed: The player has 3 minutes to score as much as possible, the player has infinite lives and infinite surrenders to use. Using a surrender banks the accumulated bonus however resets the multiplier back to 1, while dying loses the bonus and also resets the multiplier. At the end of the time limit a final surrender is automically set off banking any bonus at that time.
- Classic: The player begins with 3 lives and 3 bombs (in place of surrenders), and can earn more of both via scoring. There's no bonus score to bank in this mode, it ends when the player runs out of lives. On death the multiplier is halved.
- Expert: Like the Novice/Normal modes however failing to surrender gives a score of zero. Furthermore the enemies are harder versions of themselves and the slowmo now halts the movement of everything except the player.
- Pacifist: The player is unable to fire in this mode, and has one life and one surrender. The base score and bonus score continuously increase, with the multiplier being able to be raised by grazing enemies and bullets.
Enemies
| Enemy | Behaviour | Expert Differences |
 Chase |
Moves down the speed at a constant speed attempting to match the players horizontal position. If below the player just moves straight down without moving horizontally. | Rotates to approach the player directly. |
 Bomb |
Flies horizontally across the top of the screen periodically firing aimed bullets at the player. Can spawn from either the left or right side, and approaches the opposite side to where it entered the screen. | Fires more regularly. |
 Explode |
Enters the screen and flies to a point. Upon reaches this place does a short charge which when completed despawns the enemy but releases 8 large orange bullets in the 4 cardinal and intercardinal directions. | Fires three sets of orange bullets, each after a separate short charge, before despawning. |
 Charge |
Locates the player when spawning and flies in a straight line towards that point. | Moves faster. |
 Split |
Spawns in pairs, with a beam between each part. Destroying either enemy removes the beam. | The beam between the parts absorbs the player bullets, stopping them from passing through. |
 Runaway |
Enters from the top of the screen to fly to a point roughly two thirds down the stream. Once there heads straight up towards the top of the screen firing a stream of bullets straight down the screen. | Fires a pair of bullets each time instead of a singular bullet. |
 Beamer |
Enters the screen and moves towards a point. Upon reaching the point faces the player and begins charging (indicated by a red line). Once the charge is complete fires a big laser for a period and then leaves the screen slowly once the laser is complete. | No difference. |
Scoring
Killing an enemy gives a base amount of points: Chase is 1 point, 2 points for Bomb, Charge, and Split, 3 points for Explode, 4 points for Runaway and Beamer is worth 5 points.
The base score is then multiplied by the multiplier and added to the score.
Collecting a medal increases the multiplier by 1 and adds the multiplier value to the score. If the medal is vacuumed the multiplier is snapshotted at the time the vacuum was activated, and this amount is added to the score instead.
The bonus score increases at the rate of the multipler every 6 frames.
In Classic mode there's no bonus score, points are only awarded for killing enemies and collecting medals.
In Expert mode the value of the multipler is added to the score instead of a bonus score to be banked.
In Pacifist mode the score increases by 1 every frame.
Strategy & Tips
Hitting an enemy while in slow mo will kill it, but also hitting enemy bullets will remove them and increase the multiplier. Take advantage of the invincibility time to reposition to a safer area or ram things to increase the multiplier. The player's hitbox is increased during this time to make it easier to hit things.
There's ways of earning extra medals:
- When firing higher than the bottom quarter of the screen, an extra medal will spawn when an enemy is hit.
- Hitting an Explode while it is charging causes 2 extra medals to spawn.
- Hitting a Runaway while it is retreating causes 2 extra medals to spawn.
- Hitting a Beamer while it is firing the laser causes 4 extra medals to spawn.
There is a small window (10f) after being hit where surrendering will still activate.
The slowmo cooldown can be decreased by not activating slowmo while it is ready to be used. The cooldown decreases at a rate of 0.25 seconds for every second that passes, to a minimum cooldown time of 0.5 seconds.
The general plan is to raise the multiplier as high as possible then surrender at the last moment. The total score doesn't account for the kills from the bomb let off when surrendering.
The total score turns green to indicate when surrendering would give a new high score. The score also turns green when a high score has been reached regardless of surrendering.
Timed
Aim to last as long as possible before banking the bonus as doing so resets the multiplier.
Try to bank the bonus when there's a lot of enemies on the screen. The bomb set off will generate a lot of medals to begin to rebuild the multiplier.
The enemy spawn rate is doubled during the last 30 seconds.
Classic
The first extra life is earned at 10,000 points and the first extra bomb at 25,000. The score needed to earn extra lives and bombs increases by a factor of 10.
Pacifist
Having auto slow off makes it easier to graze bullets and enemies.
There can be only one Chase active at a time. Using slowmo to kill them is a viable tactic so they're not unexpectedly in a way.
Most of the score comes from the kills when surrendering.
Development History
The game was made in Gamemaker Studio.
Development began properly in 2020 but there were really early versions, including a very basic mobile mock up, in 2017.
Originally the main modes also had the zero score for not surrendering, like Expert, however this was quite harsh.
An early pre-release version had the Bomb enemy fire straight down, and also only had the Chase and Charge enemies. It was possible to stay alive forever by simply firing and not moving!
In early pre-release versions the player wasn't invulnerable during the slowmo period, however navigating the slowed bullets was sometimes trickier and often led to more deaths than it prevented.
Pacifist mode once allowed more than one Chase enemy, this was surprisingly a big problem - especially if they were coming from different directions.
References & Contributors
- Information provided by: Jonathan Edwards
- This template page was assembled by CHA-STG and Plasmo
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