Little Space Rangers
LITTLE SPACE RANGERS
Journey across the stars, crashing your Star Cruiser into a series of increasingly dangerous, procedurally generated planets. Explore their hazardous surfaces as you rescue your stranded crew, salvage lost cargo, and zap hordes of enemies. Can you survive long enough to reach the Mysterious Planet X? Or will you be consumed by a slime, zapped by an enemy blaster, boiled in acid, or choked to death by a toxic atmosphere?
CONTROLS
- Arrow Keys/Directional Pad - Move
- [Z] - Jump (tap, or hold for higher jumps)
- [X] - Use Held Item
- [Down] + [X] - Pick up / Swap Item
SCORE
There are several ways to earn score as you traverse a planet's surface:
- Bopping enemies
- Zapping enemies
- Securing cargo
- Transporting friendly crew off the surface
- Completing levels
- Blasting off from the planet in a new Star Cruiser
- Several secret bonuses you'll need to discover!
PLANETS
As you delve deeper into space, the planets will expand in size, add more difficult room layouts and variations, increase the chance for high gravity, unlock new hazardous biomes (including burning lava planets, sliding ice planets, and rare toxic atmospheres!), more challenging enemy variants, more enemy crew, and fewer useful items to help you along the way. While the first few planets might not cause you much trouble, by the time you reach the Mysterious Planet X, you'll need the skills and bravery of a true Space Ranger to survive!
SPECIES
Humans are boring! While they're the most common species in the Space Rangers, the other sentient species have special bonuses to help in their adventures. Along with all the random features of each planet, you'll need to accustom yourself to the unique ability of your randomly chosen cadet.
Can you reach the Mysterious Planet X with a cadet from every species?
CREDITS
Game by tmirobot. Follow on Threads for more game posts.
Uses portions of @matthughson's Advanced Micro Platformer library, which can be found here https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=46229.
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Development log
- Version 1.3 ReleasedJun 28, 2020
- Version 1.1 ReleasedNov 12, 2017
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Ive been in love with this game for years, so simple yet so fun haha
I’m in love with this comment haha! Thanks so much for playing, glad you enjoyed it!
I liked this game.
I like procedural games and was looking for this
What do the various items do anyways?
There are four items you can carry. All will give you bonus points if they’re carried back to your spaceship. Additionally, several items can be used by pressing the use button when they are held. These items have a limited amount of charges available before they will become useless (though one species can get an extra charge out of them)
- Blaster (gun)
Use this to shoot at enemies. You gain more score for jumping on enemy heads to kill them, but the gun is safer, and some enemies are spiked and cannot be jumped on.
- Teletron
Use this when near a friendly crew member to teleport them back to the ship, gaining you bonus points. You can identify friendly crew members because they will be the same species as your character and be jumping up and down.
- Healizer
Use this to heal your character. Heals a certain amount per use.
Hope that helps!
the fourth item is a head
Haha can’t believe I forgot to mention the 4th! Heads are indeed the 4th item you can carry back to your ship for bonus points, and are worth the most bonus points.
Love the game, paid for it, but then realized the zip file doesn't contain the .png version, so I can't add it to my raspberry pi PICO-8 handheld. :( Can I get a copy of the png, please?
Hey! Sorry about that! I’ll see if I can update this itch.io version, but if you want you should be able to download the cart here:
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=30232
I could easily see this be expanded into a full game! you could add an alien that would get to use the items for longer. But how do i use the teletron?
Thanks!
To use the tele-tron you must be standing next to a crew member (look for people jumping up and down that are the same species as yourself), then use it. It will transport them off planet and grant you additional bonus score.
Oh, cool!
one thing you could add to the teletron is when you rescue a cadet, there will be a higher chance of get that alien species in the future.
again, really great game!
haha that’s a nice idea! If I remember correctly I am 100% maxed out on available space (token count) in this game though, so I don’t have room for any more features without cuts. The perils of PICO-8! (Or at least my limited skills of compressing my code :D). I should use this idea in my next game tho!
Oh well
I took me a while to figure out what was going on but once I started to get it, I really enjoyed it. Good work!
I still have no idea what the severed heads are for though...
Hah! Thanks!
If you carry an item (gun, teleported, healer, or head) back to your ship, you get points for it as part of your end of level score bonus. Severed heads are worth the most points.
not hating on the game but theres alot of glitches like please patch then i could go out of bound and just win the game please fix all these bugs i wont list them because my friend found out abt it but hes sleeping rn my ... oh and heres a lil cat cus your game is short and fun
henlo. i just played your game
Thanks for playing! Your video made me realize I needed to add in-game instructions for using items, so I just added it :D
Hope you at least had a little fun! Also your mask is cool!
oh. appreciate it!!
I'm not sure if you're still around, but I came back to this game recently and finally completed the brutally difficult hard mode!
Wow! That is SUPER impressive! I don’t even know if I’ve done it without cheating before >_<
Congrats and thanks for playing!
Hi! I was playing the game on normal mode as a Fuzzi and completed one planet, and I became an Ixi when I advanced to the second planet because I pressed Z instead of X to begin the second planet. I figured that this is a bug you'd like to hear about. I'm really enjoying this game, though!
Ah! Nice catch! Uploaded a new version with a fix.
This was a stupid logic bug where if you pressed X AND Z at the same time, you could sneak into Hard Mode without having completed the game first (requirement for the mode). Also fixed it so you can't switch to Hard Mode between planets, only at game start. Had to find a few more pieces of unoptimized code in order to have enough tokens for the fix! :D
Cool
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it!