this game was originally designed with vertically-oriented touchscreen devices in mind. not necessarily phones specifically, but also larger touchscreen displays. over the course of working on it, a second control type was added which expands on the first - one where opposed to clicking to dash, the ship always follows the player's mouse/finger. this one proved to be really fun and twitchy.
eventually, i decided to also add a keyboard-based one more in line with regular shmups. in this one, the player fires automatically, but is required to "mine" the crystals by hitting the boss, and your crystal combo is directly linked to how powerful your fire is. it's a little weird, admittedly, but this whole thing was kind of an experiment.
Squeedge helped out by designing and realizing three awesome characters and a bunch of super cool boss designs, a little inspired by some of the pixel work Joker Jun did for Toaplan.
