Bomberfrog: Alpha
BOMBERFROG: ALPHA
YOUR BOMB IS YOUR LIFE!
Bomberfrog: Alpha is a horizontal wave-based shmup. Your goal is to 1) survive 2) beat the level as quickly as possible. Use bombs to help you increase your damage. But be careful because your bomb is your extra life.
Bomberfrog: Alpha currently contains one level, aiming for about 2 minutes of gameplay. At about the intended middle difficulty of the final game. It was made in 10 days. This alpha version is my submission for Bullet Hell Jam 7, which had the theme of shrink!
Enemies shrink as they take damage, meaning you need to increase your precision to deal maximum damage. They drop chips when they die. Collect the chips to fill your bomb meter. Chips inside the yellow circle will pull toward your ship. When you aren't firing, the chip pull circle is larger.
Bomberfrog will bomb again!
Controls
Input mapping is available for keyboards in the Pause menu (Esc, P, or Enter).
| Action | Keyboard | Gamepad |
| Move | Arrow Keys | D-pad |
| Shoot - Spread | Z | A, LB |
| Shoot - Focus | X | B, RB |
| Bomb | C | X, Y |
| Pause menu | Esc, P, Enter | Start |
| Toggle Audio | Shift + M | |
| Toggle FPS | ` |
Credits
Bomberfrog is made by Brett Chalupa. Music by Chromatic Arcana.
Tracks used:
Made with Usagi Engine.
View the source code: https://github.com/brettchalupa/bomberfrog
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Development log
- Alpha release of Bomberfrog!91 days ago
Comments
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This game is actually good, though I can't say it's great. If you want it to be great, I recommend adding multiple stages, and some of the HUD text blends in with the danmaku. Full review here:
https://drillimation.com/2026/05/22/bomberfrog-review/
Thanks for the feedback. This is an alpha (meaning pre-release) version I made in 10 days for a game jam. I intend to expand it into a full release with multiple stages, sprites, and polish.
So fun, and a great bite-sized introduction for genre newcomers I think!
Clear time makes for a compelling and approachable score system, and the enemy types feel distinct. Staying at their smallest size for so long gives those red targets a lot of personality. I didn't find a good use for the spread shot, but I think a single shot type is plenty at this length.
1:32.04, after trading back and forth with a friend for a while. I'm looking forward to the full game!
Really fun! Haven't cleared it yet but I got to the final boss (I think). What tool did you use for the sfx? if it is something like bfxr... how do you make sounds that aren't annoying??
First Clear! 2:28.24
Got it down to 2:19.25
1:53.82... beat the dev time... more than happy with that! Awesome shmup
Edit: new PB 1:48.95... I have no idea how molly-cactus got 1:32.04
Wow nice work!! Impressive
Thanks for the feedback (and congrats on the clear!). I made the sfx with https://pro.sfxr.me/. There are a few things I did to try to make them less grating: high pass and low pass filter to tone them down a bit and the repetitive sound effects all have variants (3 or 4 of them) and the game randomly plays one of the variants. This helps it be a bit less annoying.
Making good sound effects is something I’m still trying to figure out, it’s a tricky art!
Here’s my fastest clear: 2:18.55
There’s definitely room for improvement from me, with more aggressive bombing and chip management. Curious what everyone’s fastest clear time is!