In development · playable alpha
Into the Coil
Fly through seven places to the black heart of the galaxy.
Free · in your browser · landscape · no account, no tracking
The game
The Far Carry's boss fight, made into a whole game
A side-scrolling space shooter in the R-Type and Raiden II mould.
The Far Carry ends with a ship fight against Jörmungandr: dodge, pick your moment, spend the right weapon, and the fight gets meaner as it goes. Into the Coil takes that and makes it the whole game. Waves, hazards, a mid-boss partway through every level and a boss of its own at the end.
The gun fires itself
Your main gun is always firing, so you never think about it. Shields, bombs and the heavy weapons each have their own button and their own cooldown, and knowing when to spend them is the game.
What you find, you keep
No shop, no currency. Upgrades are lying in the level, they kick in the moment you touch them, and they come with you to the next one. Dying knocks each of them down a notch.
Surviving is the skill
Three lives, and nothing in a level gives you one back. It's about reading the screen and not being where the bullets are, not about mashing a fire button.
Seven places
Each one looks different, plays different and sounds different
You fly them in order, inward. Every level has its own sky, its own hazards and its own piece of music, and each one ends on a boss you won't meet anywhere else.
1 · The Approach
The way in. The tune the rest of the game grows out of starts here.
2 · Ember Nebula
A cathedral in a furnace. Choir and organ first, and the fire under them after.
3 · Saurian Belt
The floor-filler. Drums up front, a supersaw riff, and a raptor calling.
4 · The Labyrinth
A corridor, and something breathing in it. Footsteps, a limping spiral, a pursuit.
5 · Rime Shelf
Glass that rings and cracks, and the weather coming in over it.
6 · The Toxic Mire
Still water with something under it.
7 · The Black Heart
The centre of the galaxy, and the end of the run. A heartbeat that gets faster the whole way down.
The levels are being painted and rendered at the moment. Pictures go here as each one's done.
A run
Fifteen to thirty minutes, start to last boss
About two minutes of level and then its boss, seven times over. It's short on purpose. I cut the levels down twice in play-testing without taking out a single enemy, so what's left is dense.
Keyboard, gamepad or touch, it plays the same and none of them is faster than the others. Touch is a relative drag, the way the mobile shooters that got this right do it: the ship moves by however far your thumb moved, not to wherever your thumb is.
Where it's going
The plan is that you fly as one of the four golfers from The Far Carry, each with their own ship and their own guns, and pick your next stop from a branching chart between levels. One of the three you didn't pick betrays you and turns up later as a boss. None of that is in the alpha yet. The flying, the levels, the bosses and the music are.
The soundtrack
Out before the game is
Into the Coil (Original Soundtrack)
Eight tracks, twenty-one minutes. The title theme, then each level's music the way you hear it in the game: the level, a bit of the boss fight, and an ending. It closes on The Black Heart.
The alpha
You can play it now. It isn't finished.
The build at next.intothecoil.vulpecula.games is a proper alpha. It changes often,
bits of it are unbalanced, and there's no save yet, so nothing carries over between visits.
It runs in a browser in landscape; on a phone held upright it'll ask you to
turn it.
Same deal as everything else here. No account, no analytics, no ads, no cookies. Once the page has loaded the game makes no network requests, and a test fails the build if it ever stores something its privacy page doesn't list. More on that.
If something breaks or a fight feels wrong, I want to know: support@vulpecula.games, or the comments on itch.io. It's free; if you'd like to chip in, that's there too.