Hommie Vs.

Hommie is a in-training magic girl from the Orion constellation, who lacks of the ability to float, unlike most of magic girls, but instead has the power to alter gravity. She is also allied with the familiar chimera Bellgeese.

One day, she receives a task from the Intergalactic Magic Bureau (IMB): Defeat a group of magic girls called "The MAgic Girls Of The Round", due one of them owns a forbidden magic artefact. Can Hommie overcome them before they end up causing trouble?... or rather, how many times she will be capable of do it?

• Left and Right Keys - Horizontal movement.
• Up key - Jump (can be used twice and also in mid air).

If the bubble is active, the Up and Down keys can be used for vertical movement.

• Z/C/N (O button)- Fires a homing shot. Can be hold down for rapidfire. If not pressed for a few seconds, Hommie will get a blue aura. Pressing it again will fire stronger shots for a short time.

On the pause menu (Enter or P), is possible to activate the Auto-fire option. While this option is ON, Z/C/N (O button) will allow you to toggle the automatic rapidfire.

• X/V/M (X button) - Activates the bubble. Check the system section below for more information.
• Gamepad can be also used. 
• Try setting Auto-fire ON in the pause menu while playing on Phones or Gamepads for easier shooting control.

Your goal is defeat each opponent and survive against their bullet pattern attacks. Because your shots always targets the current opponent on screen, you just have hold the button and take care of dogging all the bullets. You can deal more damage by getting close to the opponent, and using charged shots.

Hommie only takes damage if bullets hit her core (the red square at her center). If that happens, Hommie will lose a life point, indicated by the hearts at the left-top of the screen. The game is over if all the hearts are lost.

The bubble acts as your main defensive method, capable of slowing down near enemy bullets. You can cancel them by releasing the bubble button. Note that slowed bullets can still inflict damage. The bubble also disables gravity, allowing you to move freely across the screen while active. 

Using it will drain the energy bar on the top of the screen. If is empty, the bubble will sink and lose its size. Energy is recovered automatically when the bubble is off.

Once your opponent takes enough damage, all the bullets on screen will convert into harmless socks, that can recharge your energy bar when collected. There are a total of 6 opponents. After defeating the last one, the game will loop at a higher difficulty, but each fight won will be worth of more points than before.

On the title screen, you can switch modes pressing the left or right keys.

• Normal: Fight each opponent per round. You start with 3 life points. You can get life extends by reaching certain score thresholds, starring from 10.000. You can get more points if you defeat opponents using charged shots. The more lifes you get, they will become more hard to acquire, unless you get a extend at 5 life points...

• Enchanted: Same as normal, except you start with 5 life points, opponents are always at their highest score value, and if you get hit while the energy bar is at 70% or more, you will activate an auto-guard, consuming all your energy in exchange of cancelling all the bullets on screen, without making you lose any life points. However, this mode dosen't has score extends.

On these two modes, the main source of points comes from bullets retrained with the bubble. The more bullets you catch, more points you will get.

• Trial: Challenge only one opponent constantly looping, selected pressing up or down at the title screen.  You start with 3 life points, and extends are acquired every time you defeat the opponent. Unlike the previous modes, bullets retrained don't give points. Instead, the score value of the opponent depends on how fast you defeat them.

• Score list: It's just a score table with all the records of every mode (including every opponent in Trial mode). :|

Around the end of July of 2025, I was planning to participate in the GDTK Jam 2025. This year theme was "loop". While thinking multiple days about it, I got the idea of a platformer where the player is constantly fighting a small boss multiple times. In the end I didn't join the jam, but instead I decided to use that idea for a pico8 game.

I recycled a lot of code from two prior projects: a unfinished platformer prototype and a small shmup I made a year ago. I also started posting my progress on the Lazy devs Academy discord channel, in order to add new elements in the game based on the feedback received.

Some of the bullet patterns are based on arcade shmups that I like, particularly the Dodonpachi series and Battle Bakraid.

Main program, design, sprites and soundtrack made by Martín Garzón (MG1399).

Special thanks to: 

• Fantastic Fox (Easy Peazy Games).
• Durid_Ignacy.
• Apophenist.
• Krystman (Lazy devs Academy).
• Kevin Thompson.
• Family.
• Everyone who playtested the beta, and everyone who give me feedback through the Lazy Devs discord channel.

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.