How Super Space Club beautifully combines hectic arcade gameplay with pure chill hop jazz vibes

• Lo-fi arcade space shooter to relax.
• Stylized, modern take on iconic classic arcade games we all love.
• Now available!

Hey! Here’s Graham, the solo Jamaican indie developer behind your next favorite space shooter. Great space club. I’m a big fan of the shoot-em-up genre and also have a lot of respect for classic arcade shooters. I’ve always wanted to make my own arcade shooter while also making it my own – visually, aurally and mechanically, based on my interests and background. That’s how it goes Great space club came about, and I’m not sure there’s anything that’s exactly comparable to it.

Your mission is to defend the galaxy by taking control of one of five skilled anthropomorphic misfits known as the Super Space Club. There are seemingly endless enemies that come at you in abundance, wave after wave, with each wave increasing in difficulty and variety. You must skillfully dance around the sea of ​​incoming attacks while launching your own attacks, using your chosen character’s ability to level the playing field, and when your ship runs out of power, narrowly escaping death by activating your hyperdrive. This is the core loop of the game and my homage to the arcade era of gaming, where you could play a round or ten at any time and enjoy your time to the fullest.

From there, I brought it into the modern gaming era with the art direction, certain game mechanics and most importantly the music. I didn’t want to add to the seemingly endless list of space games set in a realistic, dark and atmospheric universe with intense electronic music as a background to raise your blood pressure. Instead, Great space club Captures hectic moment-to-moment gameplay and combines it with a funky, visually stunning color palette and chill music with vocals to groove to.

The heart and soul of Great space club is indeed the music. Thanks to Missouri-based duo Fat Bard, the game sounds and feels truly unique. The soundtrack is based on lo-fi, hip-hop, jazz and reggae and fuses them into acoustic butter. The tracks feature vocals from African-American hip-hop artists, a Jamaican reggae artist, and a French hip-hop artist and singer, all of whom elevate the music beyond the average “video game music.” However, it’s not just you as a player who listens to the tracks. The music is actually a part of the game, as the characters themselves jam to it. If your ship takes damage, the track skips one beat. If you run out of energy, the music will mute so you can both focus on getting through just one more wave. If you slow down time, the music gets chopped up and messed up.

My chosen use of colors allowed me to keep the game’s graphics minimalistic, yet extremely readable and strikingly pleasant to look at for hours. Space should be a colorful place! Adding characters allowed me to have fun developing skills that fit the animals’ personalities, and it allows you to find something that resonates as both a player and a person. Each character has their own abilities, appearance and personality, and you are sure to find your favorite among the characters.

As you unlock different characters, weapons and ships throughout the game, you ultimately have over a hundred different equipment combinations at your disposal, each adding their own unique flavor to the game – each combination changing the way you play the game . Will you combine a slow but sturdy ship, a character with a shield, and a low-speed, high-impact weapon to create a tank-like build? Or do you choose a fast, low-power ship and combine it with homing missiles and a character who drops homing mines for a fragile, chaotic run? There are so many combinations you can try and see which one suits your play style best.

Whether you decide to play Great space club Whether as a zen relaxation experience or something you can quickly dive into to get a new high score, I really hope you enjoy outlasting your enemies and swinging to the rhythm of the stars.