By: Autumn Wright
Enemies InBOUND is a unique endless bullet hell in which your health is not measured in life points but rather screen space. Each time you take damage, the available screen space shrinks, and once you run out it's game over. Enemies get stronger each time they wrap the screen and spawn with increasing frequency over the course of the game, eventually even starting out in their empowered states. To counter this the player is granted occasionally spawning powerups to alter their shot pattern and fire rate, as well as screen-clearing bombs earned every 5000 points. The game was programmed in JavaScript and is rendered using the PixiJS library. Sounds are handled using howler.js.
A lot of consideration went into balancing the timing and speeds of the different game systems. For example, different enemy types are more dangerous at different stages of the game. In the early game, turrets are the biggest threat as their bullets can influence much more of the screen space than other enemies, so the angled shot is your greatest weapon against them. However as the screen shrinks and spawn rates increase, you want to be taking enemies out before they even get a chance to shoot, so the rapid fire powerup becomes more valuable. As enemy stages begin to increase without them even wrapping the screen, stopping enemy C4 becomes top priority, and the basic enemies become even harder to dodge.
Enemies are also more valuable point-wise the stronger they get, so a worthwhile strategy in the early game to get ahead on bombs for when the game gets more difficult is to let the enemies accumulate on screen for a while before clearing them all with a single bomb. This strategy is quite risky, however, as the presence of the ticking down C4 enemies means you can't focus solely on dodging, and taking damage will clear the screen of all of the enemies you could've scored.
