Chupacabras 3.0.0: rebuilt from scratch, 8 times smaller

Chupacabras 3.0.0 is out for Windows on itch.io. Same game: 256 farms, one or two players, goats to suck dry. Under the hood, everything is new.

From GameMaker to raylib

Versions 1.0.0 and 1.0.1 were made in GameMaker. For 3.0.0 the whole game was rewritten in C++ with raylib, a small open-source library for making games: the splash, the title, every farm, the pause menu, the score table, the ending and the credits.

Owning all of the code lets the game go where GameMaker can't take it. The same code is now the base for handheld versions of Chupacabras, including one that runs on a real Game Boy Advance. More on those soon.

Why 3.0.0 and not 2.0.0? This is the third time the game has been made: first in 2016, then the GameMaker remake, now this one.

8 times smaller

The art, sound effects and music all live inside a single Chupacabras.exe. Nothing to install: unzip it and play.

What's new

• New keyboard controls. Pause used to share a key with Back. Now every action has its own key: player 1 plays with the arrow keys, Z, X and C, player 2 with W A S D, Q, E and R. On a gamepad, Back moved to the left face button, next to Shoot. Every control can still be changed in the options.
• Window size on F4 and F5. The biggest size is fullscreen, and the game always scales by whole numbers, so the pixels stay sharp.
• Fairer two-player games. A player out of lives sits out until the next continue, and the UFO drops one power-up for each player still in the game.
• The music drops to half volume while paused.
• Fixes: two players with the same score are both saved on the score table, and farms keep their intended minimum corral height.
• Six-digit scores, since they could never pass 999,999 anyway.

Your old saves

3.0.0 keeps its options and high scores in Documents\CoquibyteGames\Chupacabras, so it starts with a fresh score table. Time to set new records.