Nuclear Throne developer Vlambeer shows off new bullet hell shooter

Nuclear Throne developer Vlambeer has revealed its next game: a colourful, bullet hell shooter.

According to IGN, it currently uses just three buttons—the arrow keys to move your ship left and right, and the X key to shoot. You don't have control of where your ship aims, but it'll lock on to the nearest enemy and spew out a cone of bullets in that direction. It all takes place on one screen, and you'll be dodging between enemy ships and avoiding bullets all the time.

The enemy spawning systems sounds pretty complex. When you kill an enemy, they drop some green goo, and if you go too far away from that goo then another ship will spawn in its place. Basically, the temptation will be to create space between yourself and the enemies—but that will just spawn more of them.

Vlambeer's Rami Ismail told IGN that the studio hadn't planned to show the game off at its PAX West 2018 stand (pictured at the top of this article)—but eventually did so to celebrate its eighth birthday. He said he couldn't say how much longer development will last, "maybe a month, maybe six months", or possibly longer than that.

Nuclear Throne was an excellent top-down shooter, so I'm excited to see how this one turns out.