Scoregasm is an incredible, variety rich shooter with a non-linear, branching paths style galaxy to explore. It’s pretty, accessible, fun and really rather good! Blast your way through the galaxy’s many varied levels and use your skills to change your route, find new levels, new enemies, unlock bonus challenge stages and fight the bosses to discover multiple endings!

Buy on Steam, or use the itch.io widget below. You will get a Steam key regardless of which one you choose.

Trivia

  • Scoregasm’s development was followed, along side other indie developer’s games, by the Guardian as part of their indie dozen series of features. It doesn’t seem like you can read past the first couple of paragraphs of any of the stories however :(

  • Scoregasm was given a public airing at 2010’s Euro Gamer Expo in the indie games arcade area. Here’s a photo of a few folks having a go. At the time, I was told by a friend that footage of Scoregasm was used in the BBC News coverage of the show, I guess because it’s a very videogamey looking video game, but I never managed to find it online.

  • Scoregasm Won the IndieGames.com indieVisibility Arcade Game of the Year 2011 award, narrowly beating the likely better Forget-Me-Not. Sadly, the golden teabag has been lost to time.

  • There are lots of levels in Scoregasm’s main arcade mode. Each one has an alternate challenge stage you can unlock by doing well on the given stage. These range from accuracy challenges, timed modes, score challenges and other unique ways to play. My favorite of these was a recreation of nyarlu lab’s excellent iOS game Magnetic Shaving Derby.

  • Scoregasm was featured variously in print magazines, including a review in PC Gamer and Retro Gamer as part of their Robotron lineage article.

  • Scoregasm’s developent was helped immensely by the excellent folks who attended the regular meetups in Cambridge at the CB2 Bistro.

  • Scoregasm was a spiritual sequel to my earlier title Bullet Candy, designed to improve on it in every way. I was very keen on seeing how many different ways I could use the simple move/shoot/pulse mechanic of the game to increase the variety of play in the levels and keep players on their toes during gameplay. I came up with hundreds of different things, many of which didn’t make the final cut as they didn’t quite fit wit the flow of the main game, or were too jarring in context with other etc. However i did keep the more interesting/fun/silly ones as challenge games…

  • Every level in Scoregasm has a challenge game you can unlock by beating certain criteria in that level. These can be simple twists on the main level itself, or something totally different, such as a Breakout-style game, a maze level, luring a mouse through an obstacle course, shaving a face and more! These were really fun to write.

  • I consider Scoregasm to be the most complete of all the games I’ve written. While it’s sequel, Son of Scoregasm, is a slicker package all round, the original just feels more like the whole thing.

  • John Marwin’s soundtrack for the game is a collection of old and new works, some written especially for Scoregasm. You can take a listen on the internet archive, or buy a copy of the soundtrack on Steam, which includes a booklet we put together with notes about the stories behind the music.