Zip and zap your way to the top in this aquaventure!

Shock Lobster is a Game Boy ROM designed to run on the original Game Boy handheld video game system using a flash cartridge. It should also play well on most emulators.

Note: Sound doesn't work on iOS using the web player at this time.

Venture forth on your quest as a lowly lobster imbued with magical powers, determined to inflict lethal damage to whatever stands in your way!

You start out with a handful of skills allowing you to avoid oncoming obstacles and deal damage, but will use the pearls you collect on your way to unlock more skills, upgrades, and items to push your high score higher and higher.

This game is an entry for the Game Boy Competition 2021.

Controls:

Keyboard	Game Boy
ENTER	START
TAB	SELECT
X	A
Z	B
ARROW KEYS	D-Pad

Gameplay Details:

Press SELECT (TAB) on the status screen to show detailed information about each skill, helping you decide how and when to best use the tools at your disposal for maximum output.

The A and B (X and Z) buttons are used to activate skills in combat, with the D-Pad used to select which pair of buttons is active. By default the selected pair will stick to the top pair when the D-Pad is released, but this can be disabled on the status screen. Skills may consume your energy, which is constantly refilling, or generate charges, which are consumed by finishers which scale with the number of charges used.

Several of the skills apply damage-over-time effects to the enemy, time-limited buffs to yourself, or have cooldowns before they can be used again, which are represented by bars on the bottom-left of the game screen.

The game speed and loadout/items used will be summarized on the game over panel, allowing you to compete with your friends to get the highest score using a specific combination of skills and upgrades!

Emulating on Nintendo DS:

If emulating on a Nintendo DS using GameYob there will be a graphical glitch affecting the status and gameplay screens. I've fixed the bug in a custom build (until such time as the fix is merged into an official release): https://github.com/tbsp/GameYob/releases/tag/v0.5.2a. Lameboy does not have this glitch but does have 4 rows of flickering pixels below the gameplay HUD.

Source Code:

The full source code is available on github! Only the enemy graphics are omitted, as they cannot be distributed in that form under the license granted.

Tools Used:

• RGBDS
• Emulicious
• Aseprite
• hUGETracker
• OpenMPT
• Visual Studio Code
• binjgb by binji (itch.io web player)
• JS GB Emulator (GB Studio Fork) by Chris Maltby (web player mobile controls)

Additional Code/Assets:

• gb-starter-kit by ISSOtm
• gb-vwf by ISSOtm
• hUGEDriver by Superdisk
• Sound Effect Driver and BCD functions by PinoBatch
• HiScore Library by H. Mulder
• Lucky Bestiary by LuckyCassette
• MinimalPixel Font by Mounir Tohami
• Electrox Font by Dennis Ludlow

Music From GB Studio Community Assets:

• "FridgeMusic" by Tomas Danko (CC BY 4.0) [Patterns were reordered to improve overall effect on hardware in game context]
• "Tape It Together" and "Serious Ping Pong Matches" (cropped) by DeerTears
• "Darkstone Remix" (cropped) by Tronimal