Experience three stages of thrilling action, heart-pounding music, and score-chasing-delight as you navigate your way through intricate bullet patterns and larger-than-life bosses.  Dodge, attack, survive! Pushing the system to its limits, Gun Trails runs at the device's maximum display speed, can you keep up?  Available exclusively on Playdate's Catalog, https://play.date/games/gun-trails.

Awards

Gun Trails has been fortunate to be nominated for 7 community awards, including Game of the Year! (Awards to be announced 3/8/24 wiki)

Best Soundtrack, Best Sound Design, Artistic Visual Achievement Award in an SDK Game, Best Action Game, Best Arcade Game, Outstanding Technical Achievement in an SDK Game, 2023 Playdate Game of the Year 

Press

• Articles 
  • (https://www.timeextension.com/features/the-making-of-gun-trails-a-killer-playdat...)
  • (https://www.timeextension.com/news/2023/06/dodonpachi-inspired-shmup-gun-trails-...)   

• Quotes
  • "A technical marvel that takes no prisoners" - Damien of TimeExtension
  • "Unbelievably fast. Brutally hard. Jaw-droppingly impressive. No Playdate game this year raised our blood pressures this high." - Panic Inc

Patch Notes

(v1.2)

• New features
  • Novice mode added! (can be enabled via main menu > options > novice mode). This adds a much gentler mode which reduces pressure on the player, as well as reducing base difficulty of some of the tougher bosses (manta ray + octopus).
  • TLB's dedicated music track added.
• Improvements
  • Loading is now instant (was 30-50 seconds previously)
  • Directional bullets now have a more accurately drawn rotation relative to their physical trajectory.
  • Menu card cleanly animates when selected now, removing jutter.
  • Add a min-sfx option, allowing players with sensitive hearing to disable certain sound effects they found troubling.
  • Add a ship speed option which allows a slower base speed for players who prefer that.
• Misc
  • Score values bumped to allow player expansion past exploited v1.1 meta.
• Bug fixes
  • Fixes a scoring exploit top players found by spamming b while shooting with a.
  • Fixes a screenshake bug that would persist if the player restarted during the shake which occurs upon being hit.

(v1.1)

• Bug fixes
  • fixes some low-entering bullets in the final TLB pattern
  • fixes TLB death sprite cutting off
  • fixes level 3 Boss death sprite cutting off
  • fixes ranking page presentation to accommodate larger scores
  • wide laser doesn't get clipped on the left side anymore.
  • ship movement no longer slightly clipped on the right side.
  • increased internal bullet buffer sizes as a safety precaution; this one wasn't reproducible in my testing, but one score chaser ran into it, and I _think_ its because they were letting the screen fill up before doing a shield bash, so its my best guess at a fix for a bug they saw 1-2 times in 10+ hours and I can't reproduce.
  • no-miss bonuses are per level now (e.g. if you get hit level 1, but no miss level 2, you should now get the no miss bonus for level 2's post level screen) 
  • TLB* is now accessible, previous a simple bug prevented the TLB from appearing.
  • Coins now have lower draw priority than bullets, this avoids frustrating situations where coins would obscure a bullet, particularly after the midboss, and you get popped.
• Sound issues fixed
  • re-starting/dying during the beginning of a boss fight no longer leads to double tracks being played (this was an obscure one, you have to restart or die in the first 6s of a boss to trigger it). (Note: there is still one double track issue im hunting down for patch v1.2)
  • fixes the track for level 2 ending early
• Other behavior changes

  
  

  • wide laser has a larger hitbox
  • wide laser doesnt remove its collider on impact any longer, so its more powerful for ripping through small enemy packs
  • meter build up is reduced to account for the newly upgraded wide laser.
  • midboss can no longer be cheesed by going up into center.
  • scoring changes
  • bonus for beating midbosses (10k x  health left %) 
  • bonus for beating bigboss (30k x health left %)
  • base hit values are upped to (15/30/60) for (small/med/large) enemies (old was 1/2/4)
  • per-level nomiss bonus (40k)
  • shield bashes are now worth 1000/2000/3000 (small/med/large enemies) (old was 500/1000/1500).
  • post game shard total bonus (num shards x 100)
  • nomiss bonus (250k) or just beating bonus (125k)