The Last Hope

Overview

As asteroids rain down on Earth, you join the defense force and man 12 laser cannons located in different sectors. Your mission: shoot down the asteroids to buy time for the evacuating survivors, and become humanity's last hope.

Gameplay

"The Last Hope" is a 2D arcade game that would like to test your quick reflexes and strategic thinking, but falls a bit short due to game jam deadlines. As the operator of the defense force, you must manage multiple screens, each representing a different sector under threat. Press the correct keys or buttons to fire the cannons and intercept the incoming asteroids.

Known Issues

The game was made in 10 days by three people with full-time jobs. We are proud of what we made, but there are issues:

• Design: the game as it is, is not very fun. There is an easy way to "break" the game and perfect every result. We have ideas to solve this, and will try implementing and testing later on, but we ran out of time. If you have good ideas you want to share, please leave them in the comments!
• Sounds: the soundtrack got all the love, and was custom made by A_Squirrel, but we ran out of time to look for good and fitting sound effects.
• Balancing, bugs, and many other things.

AI disclaimer

As you can probably tell, the illustrations in the intro and endings are AI generated. None of us is an artist, and we had no time to team  up with someone we do not know and subject a perfect stranger to our sheananigans on a deadline. If development of this idea goes forward, we will find a human artist.

Features

• Fast-Paced Action: Keep an eye on all 12 sectors, and react to the incoming threats.
• Multiple Endings: Experience three different endings based on your performance—whether you did poorly, okay, or successfully defended the people.
• The Music: All BGMs are original and composed by A_squirrel!

Game created for GameDev.tv Game Jam 2024.

GitHub repo can be found here.

(one of us works in marketing and two in QA, writing this page was a concerted effort and battle of edits, at one end one trying to make the game sound amazing, at the other the jaded realism of testers)