Eraser is a shoot-em-up game.
Setting:
The world is being invaded by creatures that eat the very fabric of reality, but your tank is capable of stopping them. You must destroy these reality eaters, or erasers as they’ve been called, before they touch the ground and destroy the planet. Can you thwart the invasion by going through various enemy waves to destroy the mothership?
Enemy List:
Erasers:
Defeating an eraser will reward you with 5 points.
- Circle – Circles are slow moving and should be taken out quickly before it enters its own trail.
- Diagonal Descender – This one moves along a smooth diagonal. Can be dangerous if not taken out quickly.
- Dropper – Droppers descend downwards in a slithering pattern.
- Horizontal Zig Zagger – These move very fast and cover up the upper part of the screen very quickly.
- Vertical Zig Zagger – These don’t touch the ground but they cover up the screen faster than their horizontal counterparts.
- Fast Dropper – Better react quickly or else they’ll hit the ground before you know it.
- Looper – These don’t touch the ground but they move in a looping pattern which can be difficult to hit.
- Looper Quad – Looper Quads generate four trails at once and will touch the ground quickly.
- Chaotic Quad – These move in totally random patterns, jittering all over the place.
- Star Quad – Star Quads move in a star shape. Like the Circles, don’t let them touch their own path or they will become hard to hit.
- Dodger – Dodgers are sensitive to movement making them difficult to hit if you are moving around. If you stay still, they become more predictable.
Spawners:
Defeating a spawner rewards you with 10 points.
- Slow Dropper Spawner – Dark grey flying ships that spawn slower moving droppers. Three hits will take it out.
- Dropper Spawner – Grey flying ships with a zig zag pattern on them, and they spawn regular Droppers. Three hits will take it out.
- Diagonal Descender Spawner – Light grey flying ship that spawns diagonal descenders. Take them out with three hits.
Saucers:
- Grey Saucer – Grey Saucers contain ammo. Collect their loot to restore your ammo to its maximum.
- Red Saucer – Red Saucers contain life. Collect their loot to restore your life by two units.
- Green Saucer – Green Saucers contain points. Collect their loot to earn 20 points.
- Purple Saucer – Purple Saucers contain nuclear waste. Don’t collect their loot or you will lose one unit of life.
- Mothership – The mothership appears in the last wave as a great, big ship. It drops nuclear waste whenever it is over the top of you. Take it out with 60 hits, and you will be rewarded with 50 points.
Tips:
- Don’t fire aimlessly. Conserve your ammo. If a Grey Saucer appears, consider shooting it later until you need it most.
- The erasers appear in the same spots every time. You will be able to take them out faster if you memorize their location.
- Eliminate spawners as quickly as you can.
- The erasers have the ability to slow down time which can make them appear faster. This may happen if you let them stick around too long.
- Your ammo is replenished in between levels.
- There is no maximum life units. Collect all the loot from the Red Saucers you can.
- Your score is reset upon death or if you leave the game. If you are aiming for a high score, play through all the levels in one sitting.
Development
Eraser was the first new game I created since Droplet 2013 (Porpoise Frenzy was a remake of an older project from 2005), so it was just meant to be a small game to add content to my site. Working on big projects such as Droplet and Seedling got very exhausting so I wanted to go back to a smaller scale. The concept was based on the idea of clouds descending from the sky that block the screen, hiding other descending clouds. The game was tentatively titled Cloud Zapper. However, when making the game, the clouds ended up looking like someone was using an eraser tool on the background. Going along with that idea, the name was changed to Eraser.
Fun fact: At less than 2MB, Eraser has the tiniest file size of any game on the site.