Spring Caravan '26 - Arreit Cyrano

Controls:

• Gamepad can be used.

Instructions:

You take control of Cyrano, a cyborg with electrical powers, who has to defeat as much enemy waves as possible and survive 2 minutes. Cyrano has 2 types of attacks: a basic attack using Z key (O button), and a SP attack using the X key (X button). It’s possible to rapid-fire any of these attacks by holding their respective buttons, but doing such won’t allow Cyrano to move.

Each enemy wave is composed of a group of enemies and boxes. New waves will spawn every time you defeat all the enemies (not boxes) on the screen.

Enemies and non-green boxes will drop Metals (score items) when defeated/destroyed. The type of metal dropped is affected by the item multiplayer gauge at the top-left of the screen. Defeating enemies and destroying boxes rapidly will rise the gauge, and it will deplete over time and if Cyrano get hit by an enemy attack.

The SP gauge at the bottom-right corner of the screen can be recharged by attacking and defeating enemies, and can be charged up to 3,00. SP attacks can be used by consuming 1,00 from the SP gauge. SP attacks are extremely helpful larger groups of enemies, and they also make you beefy invincible.

There’s also a perfect bonus if all the enemies and boxes are cleared. This bonus will become more valuable the more is obtained.

Cyrano has 100 health points (shown at the bottom-left corner), and he will lose them if he takes damage. The only way to restore health is by collecting the green pick-ups from green boxes. The game is over if Cyrano health is 0 or if the timer runs out.

After the game is over, you will be ranked based on your final score. Can you score and survive long enough to get the elusive SS+ rank?

Making of:

This game was made for the 2nd 16bit caravan jam. Development started one month before the submission date, and it took roughly 2 months to complete. The theme was "the sun", though I admidly didn't incorporate it.

I actually wanted to make an action game long ago. I decided to partake in this game jam since I thought that making a game around a small gameplay time would allow me to try new ideas. My main inspiration was Ufo 50’s Hell Fist (notably its hidden survival mode), as well Hudson Soft’s Star Soldier games.

I did took a lot info from Boghog’s Beat’em up 101 video, and other articles from his Patreon page, which greatly helped me during development (specially making the enemy AI), since my experience with beat ’em ups in general is very scarce.

I also used Lazy Devs Academy's Zelda Top-Down Movement tutorial as basis for this game. Because being my first take on a beat 'em up game, movement and combat were made very basic (no combos, no throws, no charged attacks, no dashes, no superjoys, nothing fancy).

Overall, I liked how the game turned out, I would love in the future work on an improved version with more moves, better combat, more enemy types and maybe including a boss as well.

Credits

Programing, design, sprites and music made by Martín G (MG-1399).

Special thanks to:

• 16Bit Hyper Turbo.
• Krystman (Lazy devs academy).
• Boghog.
• Family.

Download Instructions:

The executables are stored in zip. files. To open them, you will need a program like 7zip or Winrar in order to access their contents.

The p8.png. file can be opened in the regular version of Pico-8 or in the Web Educational version.