Flow Shrink
FLOW SHRINK
TRANSIT MANUAL // Year 2420
MAY THE SYNTH BE WITH YOU, SHRINK!
Not that kind of shrink; you deploy Resonance Towers along THE FLOW to fire calibrated SYNTH pulses at drifting subjects. Once a subject's Mass is perfectly shrunk, it is stabilized and encapsulated in a BUBBLE for safe transit.
FLOW SHRINK delivers a mix of IDLE + CLICKER + TOWER DEFENSE + ROGUELIKE, with the main focus on the spectacle of colors, numbers, fireworks and synth chords. However lots of work is being deployed into balancing and adding new combos and interactions and maybe a perma ASCENDANCE system that will turn it into a ROGUELITE.
PROLOGUE: A NEW WORLD
Humanity survived but not before consuming Earth; by mid 22nd century it was all chaos and ash. We learned from the past, flourished and over the next two centuries THE FLOW was created. A resonance engine that compresses matter into neuro-synthetic transit bubble shields that can traverse the spatial gate.
We discovered EARTHTOO, a paradise planet 6 times Earth's size. And with our advanced tech we managed to space jump ~ 200M humans, the Great Exodus of 2349. By now we're 400M and we hold a better understanding of the Universe and our neighbors.
SYNTHARUS
For a couple of decades we've been in touch with a new civilization, Syntharus, sharing knowledge, culture, philosophy and tech across the stars. Their star is dying, been dying for a while. We put in place our advanced Spatial Gates and we're bringing them to EARTHTOO, there's enough space and resources for all of us.
They don't have our body shape but they possess incredible intelligence and empathy. The weirdest thing we discovered about them is they get SHRUNK upon being exposed to SYNTH music. But that comes in handy, since our space travel bubbles are human sized only.
THE FLOW
THE FLOW is the heart of the resonance operation and your primary manual interface. It never sleeps; subjects generate Resonance Data during transit, fueling massive roguelike evolution packs for your arsenal. You can also manually conduct the frequency: clicking the Upstream half knocks units back for more processing time, while Downstream hurries stabilized subjects toward the exit.
RESONANCE TOWERS
Precision single-note SYNTH bursts. Bolt towers mark subjects for priority resonance targeting. Rapid compression utility.
Deep ambient cryonic vibes. Frost towers slow subject drift significantly, buying time for compression.
High-frequency yellow SYNTH. Volt towers ground resonance energy between subjects, applying Charge for rapid-fire swarm suppression.
Concussive low-frequency SYNTH. Area-of-effect implosions that shake subjects into resonance with massive force.
Continuous SYNTH beam. Increases pressure over time on a single subject. Catastrophic at high Heat levels.
Oscillating violet SYNTH waves. Induces Desync, a resonance fragmentation that disrupts armor and defenses.
The orchestral backbone. Support towers amplify and synchronize all nearby towers, boosting their SYNTH output.
EVOLVE & INVEST
Accumulating enough Resonance Data triggers an EVOLUTION event. You must choose between three randomized augmentations to refine your pipeline. If immediate power isn't required, you can INVEST your data instead. This grants a passive Resonance gain for every pending Evolve stack you hold, allowing you to face tougher subjects with a smaller arsenal while building up a backlog of upgrades. This enables a powerful idle strategy: once your defense is stable, you can let stacks accumulate and return later to trigger massive, sequential power spikes.
DISCLAIMER
Hello everyone, thanks for joining! FLOW SHRINK is my entry for Bullet Hell Jam 7. It's up to Chief actually! Otherwise, it's just the story of a species' tragic collapse or maybe glorious future?
This is my first AI assisted code project, I started playing with it a few days before this JAM (can provide .git) and then Bullet Hell Jam 7 gave me a theme, direction, purpose and more importantly, a goddamn deadline. For all these I am grateful!
The entire story, game concept, testing and balance, cards and overall synth integration are personal ideas. Sure, a lot of these cards are inspired by other roguelikes but I did my best to combine some genres and make something different. The organic units are procedurally generated based on defined rules and types. Visually, all projectiles are part of a random music notes generator that adapts to the active shooting patterns and effects, cascading from the initial pulses to the combat text numbers and final fireworks. The sounds are synthesized via the Web Audio API, where each ability plays within 4 chords at different pitches. Everything you see and hear is vectorial graphics and audio generated based on some sets of rules. And, again, I have used AI while coding this.
About the JAM theme, the Shrinking is part of the core process and there are a lot of projectiles, but this is not your typical Bullet Hell game, I'm aware of that. But Q&A said many bullets and shrinking!
I've been a webdev and PM for 15+ years and a degenerate gamer for my whole life and wanted to try some ideas out. While it's been almost 2 weeks of continuous work (sometimes till 5-6AM), a struggle with my always breaking working features AI agents, it still cuts a lot of corners while still working at a 10x speed than when I would normally code. I understand the AI ethics debate and it's ok if the project is rejected. Thank you for consideration.
I have another non-AI game in the works, a Unity party game and we've been at it for like 1 year in a team of 3, on and off depending on our free time. It's been a lot of work. We didn't get a lot of traffic at NextFest, maybe our game sucked but also there were 4k games, compared to 1-2k games in prev years. Now I am becoming part of the problem but really, I just wanted to test out what the fuss is all about as a personal learning experience.
GL HF to everyone participating, creating or playing and remember, FLOW MUST GO ON!
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