A downloadable game for Windows


Master your Switchblade in frantic combat against the endless swarm! 

Switchblade is a frantic top-down shooter where you use your titular Switchblade to shoot and ram through waves of alien creatures. Pave your way through the endless swarm, and be careful not to overheat! 


  •  6 game modes, including Pure, Rush and Chaos! (2/6 present in demo)
  •  30 intense challenges, featuring 3 boss battles and extra game modes not present in the core set. (4 challenges + 1 boss present in demo)
  •  50 unlocks, including music, palettes, backgrounds, post-processing shaders, maps, game modes, and more! (none present in demo)
  •  A ton of options to tweak the game exactly how you like, and a set of 3 unlockable ships to suit your playstyle! 


 With Switchblade I wanted to make a classic arcade-style game with quick runs and tons of replayability, with the classic pick-up and play, easy to learn hard to master gameplay loop, and a ton of extra unlockable content to keep things fresh. I wanted anyone to be able to pick it up and have a good time, without needing to be good at these kinds of games. I hope you enjoy it!

Download

Download
switchblade-win64.zip 67 MB
Download
switchblade-win32.zip 66 MB
Download
switchblade.love 74 MB

Install instructions

The win versions just work.

The .love version needs LOVE2D to be installed.

Development log

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Comments

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Deleted 15 days ago

This is all helpful, thanks!


to go through each point 1 by 1:


  1. That's just a bug with the UI atm, it's because the big rectangle with text to the right is also a UI element in the hud. It's supposed to skip to the next selectable element (quit) but it doesn't. It'll be fixed by the last release of the demo.
  2. Not sure why that's happening, the menu in general seems choppy and I'm not sure why. Once again I'll try to fix it.
  3. The giant white circle isn't a bug - It's a deliberate feature. Boosting into 5 enemies within the same boost creates an explosion that kills all enemies within it. Really it should also make the player invincible or something, and have better effects.
  4. Shouldn't be centered, that's weird. Thanks for letting me know.
  5. I'm still not sure how much of a problem this is, because there are enemies that home in on the player and there'll be more enemies later on that do more complex things. If I was to dump a lot of enemies that get up in your face at the beginning of the first level, then the already niche asteroids style controls coupled with it not giving you chance to learn will make it a pain, and may turn people off. I'm gonna have to think about it.
  6. Argh, more forgetful things... The enemy with a circle shields enemies within it and can only be killed by boosting (boost killable enemies signaled by the white outline, like the boss-orbs). There *WAS* an effect for this, but clearly it's somehow broken. The laser pointer guy shoots a laser that instantly overheats your ship. At first it was way too aggressive, so I made it stop charging the laser when you boost. That clearly doesn't work though because it just dies before it can do anything.
  7. Yup sound effects are all kind of crap right now... I'm likely going to replace them all. It makes me squint too.
  8. The spore creature phase is just "shoot it until it shields itself again", there's no health bar yet, I probably should have added it before pushing this demo build really, I'll make it a priority.
  9. This has been mentioned before, it looks like slowdown but it's a deliberate freeze frame. I'm starting to think it just doesn't look that good if people interpret it at slowdown.

This is all super helpful, thanks for the in depth feedback! There's lots of little things I need to write down so I don't keep forgetting to look into them. I think there's probably better ways to incentivise movement other than lobbing lots of enemies at the player, pickups and things sound cool or death zones... I'll have to think about it. There'll definitely be more eventually - the plan is to have 3-5 levels and some extra content (and stuff to incentivize replaying those levels). I'm also really glad the boss seems fun and somewhat intuitive, I was worried it didn't look very good visually too lol