Ikari no Yousai: Fortified Zone 3D - Stage 1 demo

He has the guts.

She has the guile.

Blast through the front lines.

Blow their artillery away.

Together they have a chance, in the FORTIFIED ZONE.

Just for fun, here's Stage 1 of the Game Boy top-down shooter classic Ikari no Yousai, aka Fortified Zone reimagined as an early '90s first-person shooter using Easy FPS Editor.

Needless to say, Grave Reaper Cushions is in no way affiliated with Jaleco or Nintendo...

Dev Note:
This release is cheap, cheerful and very unfinished, even for a one-level demo; the plan is to have the boss level end when the last turret is destroyed, except I don't know how to implement that yet - consider the demo complete once you have destroyed the three turrets and have gotten tired of the cool soundtrack...

I started work on this as kind of a "come-down" after taking part in the Unofficial Easy FPS Editor Jam #1. I wanted to do something else with the engine, without the pressure of having to create something from scratch. So on the basis that top-down action and FPSs share easy common ground, and with reimagined adaptations being inherently cool, I got to work.

Anyone familiar with the Game Boy game will notice compromises:
* I had an idea to attempt to emulate the health system by starting the player with only a small amount, necessitating picking up health items to boost it up to 100%, but that hasn't been implemented in this release; it's just the default retro FPS health system here;
* Keys were a stackable, single-use item in the original. Here, once you've found The Key, you've found The Key...;
* Each enemy type drops the same pick-up, as opposed to the more random method of the original;
* Doors sometimes locking the player into a room until all the enemies have been defeated has not been implemented (I have a few theories as to how that could work in EFPSE, but no clue where to start as yet...);
* There are rooms in the Game Boy original in which missiles etc. would fly across the screen and the player would have to destroy all of them to progress. Here, I substituted an "original" enemy Frankensteined together from other sprites, who fires faster moving projectiles and has a larger health pool;
* The "3-Way" weapon functions more like a shotgun than the "spread gun" of the original.

I intend to finish this at some point. Further developments include a full complement of weapons as true to the Game Boy game as possible within the engine, with a full complement of weapon sprites to go with them (I will also be redrawing that pistol - I like how it turned out, but it's proper first-draft material and no mistake!), and rebalancing of stats across the board (I want to keep the pistol significant; in this demo it's far too easy to keep the 3-Way fully loaded).

(Also that menu being effectively white lettering on white...:
Changing the text colour was easy enough in the version of EFPSE I originally made this on... then a bug prevented the enemy projectiles from firing, or crashed the game when they did... 😬
So I rebuilt the game in an earlier version of the Experimental build, and everything worked... except changing the text colour...!)

I'm working on other fangames, as well as original material. You can check out some of my other fan projects here:

Is there a Patreon? Of course there's a Patreon...!

Thanks for looking!