Wesmaze is an arcade-roguelite I developed back in 2009 after I finished
Rogue Planets.
Prologue:
The end of the universe has come. More and more suns are turning into supernovae, obliterating all their planets. Perhaps, as some scientists theorized, the universe will soon reset as time loops back to the start after reaching its end. But the fact is that no human will be able to survive much longer. Most of us already died when the Earth was destroyed. There were a few survivors, crews on space ships in deep empty space; I'm one of them. I command my own small space ship with no crew except me. However, the other remaining humans eventually gave up hope when they accepted their situation, committing suicide. But I'm different. Of course I realize that it will be impossible to live on much longer, but if I collect resources from the remains of the planets flying though space I believe I can prolong my life -- perhaps even so long that I die of old age. That is the goal of my remaining life.
In other words, Wesmaze is a game only about surviving as long as possible and consequently gaining a high score.
You can download the game here:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1VapDGffCdPMms5d2ZhdnNCVHcDeveloper's Note:
During the development of Rogue Planets I added a real time aspect to the game that affects the score and I found that the time aspect made the game much faster-paced and requiring a lot more playing skill. I wanted to put this into a new game, making speed not only affect your score but also how long you survive. A fast-paced game that's easy to learn but very hard to master. Also, there was a person called Wes who kinda liked my games but always complained about the field of vision being to small and I always argued that it is important to have a small field of vision as that makes you require more playing skill. In Wesmaze, the discussions with him actually made me have this game idea: I allow people to set their field of vision themselves, but strongly punish them for making it big. So in Wesmaze, there are suns (supernovae), but you should not only not touch them, alone having them in your field of vision strongly damages your ship. This is the core idea of the game.
So flying as fast as possible, avoiding asteroids and never revealing suns is the core aspect of the game that's easy to learn. There are tons of ways to earn points in the game. Being fast, never taking any damage, flying close past asteroids. But the real complexity comes with its "extras". The first extras are simple S=Shield+ and T=Time+, but after that, each stage, another extra is assigned to a letter. You will know the name of the extra but what exactly it does you have to find out yourself (the name might give a clue, though). The letter assignment is different each game and you only see the last 4 letter assignments, the other letters you need to keep memorized in your head. All the extras can be good or bad, depending on the situation, so learning what each does and quickly deciding whether and extra should be taken or not, can have a huge impact on how far you get and how many points you get.
I strongly recommend reading the included readme.txt before playing as it gives a lot of valuable hints.
I played this game for many years and still managed to get constantly better at it and gaining higher scores. I really like how the game ended up. But I only ever released it in one community so far. Well now you can play it too. :-)
Just in case you want to challenge the developer... here are my "1 Life" scores I gathered from 2009 to 2013:
