If your game interest includes the old Galaga family of vertical, wave-clearing, screen-based arcade shoot-em-ups, you may want to check out the recent indie entry Nova Swarm on Steam. Gallery shooters are a small and little serviced niche, so it's especially exciting for an old arcade player like me to see a tiny powerhouse like this really claim some space for itself. One of the game's features is a dedicated developer who seriously soaks up feedback, and has been relentlessly upgrading the game, despite the $5 pricing, since release in early June (not early access, but be warned things can change from day to day). It's definitely feeling due for some wider attention.
Another key aspect is a rather outlandishly off-kilter arcade-oriented personality, which I've found surprisingly charming. That kind of thing doesn't normally play well for me, so maybe give it a chance before you turn voices off :)
Action-wise, you've got your basic moving around the screen and shooting upward, plus a slow-movement button and a "phase" button, which offers brief invulnerability on a short cooldown (and which you will need). There are bonuses for grazing close to bullets (which you can do while phasing), and three chained phases gets you a single special anti-shot bullet that wipes shots and damages enemies in a modest area if it connects. There are a lot of ships to unlock, which vary on a fairly small range of attributes, but still add some variety or at least options to explore for your favorite.
There's two core modes, each with its own leaderboard. One for the more pure arcade experience, and the other with a simple pick-from-three upgrades after each boss. Bosses come every few randomized waves and are smaller, simpler affairs here. Upgrades are mainly modest stat cards (so far), which helps offset the enemy scaling difference as the run goes on, so the upgrade mode feels much more like a reduced arcade difficulty than like a wild combo build type of roguelite deal. There are also a variety of short-term powerups that drop, in both modes.
Runs start pretty soft, so aggressive players probably need to wait a bit for things to pick up and challenge them, but you'll surely have a good enough idea what it offers within Steam's two hour refund window. The bosses are weird and feel janky, but once you get the hang of their spazzy movement and odd fake-outs, they can seem less bizarre. Watch for the countdowns on the top-center of the boss. Those are generally not to be ignored, and a number of attacks do need you to use your phasing in advance. These are obviously entirely different from bullet hell style bosses. You actually see more bullets during the waves than the bosses, though occasionally a reinforcement wave spawns alongside a boss, to make your life exciting.
Personally, arcade shooting is my wheelhouse, and I've been feeling this charming little gem deserves some more eyes on their project, and some more names on their leaderboard, so I hope some of y'all will help out. I've made sure you'll have to put a little work in if you want that top spot for yourself :)
Yeah, I was posting with a screenshot, but I guess that gets replaced with whatever it pulls from the link, and as cute as that cover is bigger, makes sense it's more prone to catching such knee-jerk reactions than seeing the actual game.
They probably used AI coding it, too, but as a programmer I can be glad a lone dev used their tools to create something they want/enjoy, in a niche no one touches, and at a price that'll never make them any real money. This is a benefit of AI. The alternative is simply this game not existing. Thought people over here might be more amenable to such a micro-niche indie project. Ah well, so it goes.
I can't speak for everyone who downvoted, but maybe allow me to share a viewpoint.
Some see the use of generative AI as simply stealing other people's hard-earned craft and talent (for the generated art) and programming skills, without even so much as credit or visibility. Plus setting the planet on fire for it, using up precious non-renewable resources, draining aquifers, endangering jobs etc. while making billionaires richer and more powerful and taking away the means of production from the common folk. Who will have to pay the powerful for compute time because they've deskilled so much they can't put together a gallery shooter game themselves anymore.
Not trying to troll or flame or anything, but what's a good tool for some is all those bad things for others. That's why any use of it gets such a negative reaction, especially in the fediverse.
I'm just glad when some bring good things to occasionally seep out of these obviously inevitable changes.
I'm guilty too and I let (mostly local or hydro/solar-powered) LLMs write utility scripts for me, but I'm fully aware of the illegal way they've been put together and I wouldn't use them to make a product I sell, that would feel unethical.
I hope one day someone makes a model that is trained on e.g. only GPL, MIT or BSD-licensed code that gives full attribution to the generated output, and one that uses only Creative Commons art that is cleared for remixing, for example. And then there's the huge corpus of public domain texts you can use for general text analysis. It's not that these things aren't available, just that the commercial incentive (those billionaires, eh) is stronger to simply steal everything and ignore any licensing or laws.
All this can be done ethically and with small environmental impact, the fact that they choose not to do it in order to chase power and profit is the most offensive part.