Self Destruct

Heck shooters, amongst not having a real consistant name within their own genre of top-down ship-based shooters are proably one of the best genres for procedural generation.

Self Destruct takes these two styles and marries them nicely together, creating a nice heck shooter. I've never been good at heck shooters, and they're not terribly common so for those of you who don't know what it is, I'll explain.

Top-down ship-based shooters are ultimately descended from Galaga, where you have a single ship at the bottom of the screen, and waves of various types of enemies descend from the top, whereupon you shoot at one another until one of you is dead. Heck shooters take that formula, and kick it up a notch, where enemies don't fire occasionaly, they fire constantly, and from all directions. Typically, you can regognize a heck shooter by the number of bullets on the screen at once, if there are more than there are ships, that's a probably a heck shooter.

In Self Destruct, you're given simple controls, and a simple goal. Reach wave 250. The good news is that most waves only last three seconds. The bad news is that's because the enemies are shooting down the screen so fast that you need to apply every reflex you've honed over the years to avoid being blown to smithereens in the first few seconds.

Unlike Probability Zero, Self Destruct is procedural rather than random. The guiding distinction? Pregeneration. Ships don't just randomly shoot from the top of the screen, they come in particular waves and combinations of waves. Sometimes you'll see a wave of fodder ships protecting a wave of attackers, sometimes it's a wave of explosives. Sometimes, the fodder ships will be in the shape of a V, other times an X, and sometimes there's just a huge thick line of them. The waves and their contents are randomly generated, but not the specific waves themselves. That's procedural.

Now, the look of the enemy ships were dfferent each time you loaded the game, that'd be awesome.