"Dr. Venom, leader of the evil Bacterion Empire, has opened a rift in space-time, and sent the planet-core Zelos Force to the year 6640. Destination: The Nemesis system. Using Zelos Force to conquer and terraform the planets of the Nemesis system, Dr. Venom hopes to expand the Bacterion Empire and prevent its own future destruction at the hands of the Gradius Union. Unprepared for a conflict against Bacterion, the Gradius Union desperately unveils an early model Vixen fighter ship - its only hope of fending off Bacterion's forces and preventing disruption to the future's timeline."



The player assumes the role of a fighter-pilot, and either model of the fighter-ship "Vixen." Each model has a slightly different selection of available weapons and features.

By defeating specific enemies and collecting power-cells, the ship progresses along a power-up meter. (bottom-center of the above screenshot) When a selection is highlighted, you can choose to activate (or upgrade) the item, or continue progressing toward more expensive power-ups.

Vixen Type-1:

SPEEDUP | MISSILE  | LASER   | OPTION | FORCE F.
SPEEDUP | SPREAD B.| LASER   | OPTION |[F.SHIELD]
SPEEDUP |          |[V.LASER]|
SPEEDUP |          |[SCREW.L]|
SPEEDUP |

SPEEDUP - increases ship speed (upgradable)
MISSLE - fires a single missile downward
SPREAD B. - unleashes a missile that explodes upon impact, damaging multiple, adjacent targets
LASER - fires a laser blast in a straight line, which moves with the ship's own trajectory
LASER (2) - standard laser with extended range and damage
OPTION - creates a ball of energy, which follows the ship and mimics its shot patterns
FORCE F. - surrounds the player with a force-field, protecting the entire ship from damage

Vixen Type-2:

SPEEDUP | MISSILE  | DOUBLE  | OPTION | FORCE F.
SPEEDUP | HAWKWIND | DOUBLE  | OPTION |[F.SHIELD]
SPEEDUP |          |[V.LASER]|
SPEEDUP |          |[SCREW.L]|
SPEEDUP |

DOUBLE - fires an additional shot along a diagonal pattern
HAWKWIND - fires two missiles top to bottom

Temporary / Special upgrade units:

V.LASER - fires a vertical laser beam, which destroys targets above the ship
SCREW.L - fires a wide-dispersal laser which covers more area than the standard laser
F.SHIELD - a space-fighter shield which makes the ship completely invulnerable for a short amount of time

Example level designs: (with enemy and item data)

Stages 4 - 5: Macro-Organism Zone / Bacterion Base



Stage 1: Floating Continent

WOW................ Your graphic style and your designs are flawless.........

darn this is amazing, especially these level designs. I would love to see this in ASM or Axe. I wonder how fast tilemap display is in Axe? If a tilemap can be rendered extremly fast, it could allow both grayscale and scrolling at once, since all the programmer does is cycle through 3 tilesets drawn with Nitacku's grayscale dithering program then converted to hex

Looks great Zera, cant wait to see what comes of this!

I don't know if you've seen Builderboy's smooth scrolling program with Axe, but it is quite possible, and it's only the early stages of Axe. I believe when Axe becomes more developed, it will not only be able to handle scrolling, but also even support it as a command/function

Actually, you could do 4px scrolling with axe. It would be like Builderboy's smooth scrolling routine, except 4px at a time instead of 1

yeah I know. I was just mentionneing about dealing with the issue of having to show an additional column of tiles to the right (and sprites), causing a slow down

Ah gotcha.

GLORY...awesome!