Balloon to the Moon

Balloon to the Moon is a local co-op game about a pair of fuzzy creatures trying to get through a swarm of sky squids to the moon. Two players work together to steer the balloon, fire the cannons, and collect the squid coins that allow them to fly higher, all while trying to avoid letting the squid sneak up on them from behind.

I made this for the TIGsource Cockpit Compo in 2009, and it actually got me a bit of attention on Bytejacker, which was an exciting thing to me. (Mr. Carboni is wrong, in that clip though. You can totally win, and the squid will totally eat you)

This game, despite being old, is one of my favorite pieces of work. It's a little glitchy, (The characters sometimes fall off the screen for no reason, which I fixed by making them fall back in through the top) but it's playable and winnable and has a great eerie sense of paranoia to it, especially if you play it alone in the dark.

The music is all from modarchive,org: pilot_jacket.mod, blackout.mod, insanity_-_a_dream.mod, kraken.xm.

The squid drawings were done by my then much littler brother Patrick Gibson.