About

Follow the journey of the protagonist U as they explore the fascinating and dangerous world of the deep sea...... errm, not really. Story mode was scrapped quite early in development, after all. What you can do in Unomaly is fight against seven different bosses of increasing difficulty in a bullet-hell-like arena battle format.

The cute gimmick of this specific game is that, contrary to your opponents which are capable of filling the screen with bullets, lasers, and other nasty stuff, you yourself have no direct means of attack whatsoever. Instead, you need to reflect some of the projectiles your enemy shoots at you back at them, always weighting being relatively safe against doing more damage to the boss.

A fair warning at this point: This game is quite hard. Dying over and over again while memorizing the bosses' attack patterns is expected, even against Orbius, the "tutorial" boss, let alone any of the later bosses. Beating all the bosses is a considerable achievement. Even on our dev team, the dedicated playtester is the only one who can do it as of writing this. If you end up completely stuck on some particular segment, feel free to check the gameplay videos on the Youtube channel for some inspiration.

Controls/Instructions

A short description is given in-game, this is a somewhat more detailed explanation.

WASD to move
RMB to dash towards mouse cursor, you are invincible while dashing
LMB to reflect projectiles
Controls can be changed in the options menu
Menu navigation using mouse Controller controls should work in theory, but are neither really "supported", nor recommended

Your main method of movement will be dashing, regular movement is pretty much only for fine adjustments. You can dash continuously, and a dash initiated before the end of the previous will be "queued" to be performed as soon as possible. Beware, however, that there is always a time window between dashes when you are vulnerable.

You can reflect purple glowing projectiles back at your enemy. When in range for reflecting, the projectile will be highlighted, click at that moment. The reflecting range is much larger in front of a moving projectile than behind it.

If you get hit, you get a shield which will protect you from further damage for a short while. Projectiles with a plus sign on them are healing projectiles. Collect them to heal the damage you sustained.

The Story Behind

I've written down everything I really have to say about the game, but the page still looks kinda empty, so here I am, writing down my rambling grievances for the world to see. Perhaps some of this will be a useful lesson to someone in order to avoid the mistakes I made.

Unomaly started as a small student project... four years ago, that is. Yup, the "small" part kinda didn't work out. I had started on it together with one friend and a lot of motivation as a passion project, only for all of that to be crushed by the brutal reality of game development.

It should have just had been a little bullet hell game with a few cool bosses and maybe a little bit of a cinematic story... Yeah, good thing I at least had someone who convinced me to cut the number of planned bosses from 13 down to 7. And I really wanna beat up my idiot past self who resisted cutting it down any further.

Over these past four years, passion gave slowly way to monotony, and motivation to boredom. A few more friends helped here and there, but for the most part, this was a one-man project after that one friend jumped ship after losing all of his motivation. By the end of it, I just wanted to be done with it already.

Is the game perfectly polished for release?
No.

Is it full of various bugs and glitches of varying severity?
Probably. I fixed pretty much all we found, so there hopefully shouldn't be anything gamebreaking at the very least, but there's only so many bugs a "QA department" consisting of one person can find. And I'm probably not gonna fix any bugs found in the future, 'cuz I'm sick of bugfixing and the code is a house of cards held together by some kind of magic unknown to even myself.

Nevertheless, I am still very proud of the final product. It's the first project of this size I managed to finish, and I genuinely believe that it ended up being a pretty fun little game.

Anyways, if you actually read this far, uh, much appreciated I guess? At any rate, I hope you like our little game.