Take control of the X52-Arklight, a powerful spaceship and your homeworld's last chance of freedom. Battle through 50 cities, blasting a path through the Krainian empire's blockades, tanks, turrets and attack craft.

Power up energy spheres to blast blockades and the enemy targets. Learn to control each sphere's direction for greater accuracy and absorb them to conserve your ship's energy. Use your ship to deflect your energy spheres to keep them in play. It's good to conserve energy, as when you're out, your ship will explode!

• Liberate fifty cities while blowing stuff up.
• Power up shots to take out alien blockades.
• Absorb power spheres to conserve your energy.
• Free your homeworld from the Krainian Empire.

Arklight is at its heart a breakout game. It just happens that it's also a vertical scrolling shooter

The idea was taken from a game I wrote on the Commodore 64 called Outbreak, which was a scrolling breakout game. The scrolling added an inherent time constraint to the breakout genre. You have to break the bricks quickly or you'll get squashed when they reach the bottom of the screen. I wanted to have another go at doing something with the idea.Arklight takes this principle a step further by making breakout's balls your ship's bullets. This means you control how many balls/bullets are on screen, but more bullets means you're using more energy, there has to be a trade off

The ship in Arklight is round by design. This helps control how the balls deflect more accurately. After all, who in their right mind would make a space ship out of a bat? One last design element is the ship's ability to reabsorb its bullets. This was necessary as enemy ships and turrets need to be shot multiple times. During development this tended to create more bullets/balls that the player could keep in play, so reabsorbing them made sense.

While absorbing, bullets head towards your ship creating a new way to alter the bullet's trajectory. With a little practice it becomes an important part of the game.