Micrometer Friend

Avoid red circles and collect yellow circles. Press spacebar to move the yellow dot to a new location. Be careful! Your little white circle friend has some weight to him/her. It takes time to speed up and it takes time to slow down.

This is my first experiment in making the kind of bullet hell for me. There’s really nothing special here. At least nothing here seems like it should be special. The biggest difference from a typical bullet hell is that your character has momentum. You don’t just stop the moment you let go of the d-pad/analog stick. This actually changes the gameplay a lot! There’s a lot of asking yourself “Can I get to the next gap in time?” I like questions like that. 

The fact that your little circle friend takes awhile to stop when moving through the endless onslaught of red circles means that you often don't have a clear reference point for how everything is moving. It's very mind altering! Eventually you get used to it, but it's hard to forget that very first experience of navigating through the warped geometry.

A fun accident I noticed in making this is that collecting each new yellow circle feels like a different level. Going in different directions through the field of red circles requires a different strategy for navigating, and each yellow circle is almost guaranteed to require you to move in a different direction. It would be fun to take this concept further and make a whole game that feels as deep a journey as, say, the original Super Mario Bros that is all a single screen.

The game gets its name because it's all about fretting over extremely small distances. Also micrometer is a pretty cool sounding word!