Galaxy Raiders is a top down bulletstorm endless arcade shooter in space! Defeat each wave of enemies to collect loot, upgrade your character, a completely offline single player experience.
It is available for download on both the Android Play Store and the Apple App Store. See the links below.
Galaxy Raiders - Post Thoughts from the Into the Void
The year was 2022.
After the insanity of 2020 and the virus that cannot be named. There was so much money pumped into the economies of the world that society had to adjust for it.
Add onto this ptsd change of behaviour, central banks lowering interest rates to incentivise spending and what do you have. The Clown Market of 2022.
The Clown Market is the general word being used to describe the complete upside down economic behaviour that happened during 2020-2023; There is no telling how long it will continue for.
The investment behaviour of companies in every sector makes absolutely no sense. What should be the value of a publicly listed company with no revenue and millions of debt? 5 billion dollars of course. What is the value of a small micro cap real estate company with minimal debt and revenue, nothing of course!
(We will come back to this topic in a moment.)
In the middle of everything going on in the market, a mediocre programmer with time on his hands named Pistol Taeja aka Me, decided to spend a few months creating a mobile game.
The aim was to simply get a title out there onto the various mobile gaming stores alone, without a publisher or backing so I can confirm for myself the harsh reality of Free 2 Play games.
By going through this journey, I could improve my programming and design skills as well as hunt down some good artists to work with for future projects.
If luck plays out, maybe it turns into a cult classic? (Hint hint!)
This desire gave birth to Galaxy Raiders.
The game turned into a top down shooter with anime girls; effectively a 2022 clone of the game Dragon Flight which was popular back in 2014 or so in South Korea.
It is my most unoriginal idea ever and quite frankly, I am very embarrassed! This is coming from the same guy that designed a whole visual novel about banging kitchen appliances. Being unoriginal is a sin to my soul.
With some love and help from 2 fantastic artists and music commissioned on fiverr, the project was completed and the game was released on both stores at the end of 2022.
The game took an absolute nose down and did poorly. I did not recoup any of the money spent or the time invested. Looking back it was 100% my own fault, the market was absolutely flooded with cheap knock off games from every angle possible. The hyper casual market hit an all time high.
All of the economic activities of 2020 had come to roost and I did not take into consideration that an average knock off game like Galaxy Raiders would not cut it.
Galaxy Raiders never stood a chance in a market rife with so much trash, on top of being an uninspiring game to begin with.
But, through that garbage, I was able to achieve the other tasks I initially set out.
I threw all my old code away, created new code and vastly improved as a programmer.
I also met 2 fantastic artists who are underrated!
We now have a structured process on how to flush through ideas.
Compared to a University degree (a piece of toilet paper I regret having), this was a wonderful lesson that is still being utilised.
Thanks to everyone who supported us along this journey.
Galaxy Raiders — the mobile arcade shooter I made in a few months
Galaxy Raiders is a top-down bullet-storm arcade shooter for iOS and Android. You blast through waves of enemies in space, collect loot, level up your character, and do it all completely offline. No Wi-Fi required, no paywalls mid-run. Just you, your ship, and an increasingly annoyed galaxy.
I built Galaxy Raiders with one goal in mind: get a finished game onto the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store without a publisher, without external funding, and without losing my mind. Spoiler — two out of three isn't bad.
The game runs across five levels with ten playable characters. Each wave of enemies you clear drops loot you can use to upgrade your loadout. It's the kind of game you pick up on a commute and put down forty minutes later slightly confused about where the time went.
Why I made it as a solo indie developer
Before Galaxy Raiders I had shipped zero games. I'd built prototypes, started projects, abandoned projects, renamed projects, and generally treated game development like a thought experiment rather than a discipline.
Galaxy Raiders was a deliberate scope constraint. Pick a genre that doesn't require a narrative team, a composer, or a three-year roadmap. Space shooter ticks every box. The core loop — shoot, dodge, collect, upgrade — is simple enough that one person can build it without constantly second-guessing the design.
The side benefit was working with artists for the first time. Getting the character designs for Galaxy Raiders' ten playable characters made was the part that actually prepared me for bigger projects down the line, like P For Pistol.
What Galaxy Raiders taught me about shipping on mobile
Getting a game onto both major app stores is less glamorous than it sounds. Apple's review process alone is a sport. There are certificates, provisioning profiles, screenshots in seventeen different resolutions, and a review team that will reject your build for reasons that make you question your life choices.
But the moment it was live on both the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store, something shifted. The theory that I could ship a complete game became a fact. That matters more than the download count.
If you're wondering whether any of this translates to actual marketing strategy, I wrote about whether indie developers should care about SEO — short answer, not as much as you'd think.
Play Galaxy Raiders now
Galaxy Raiders is free to download on iOS and Android. It's a single-player offline experience, meaning it works on a plane, a bus, or anywhere else you're trying to avoid eye contact with strangers.
If you're curious about what else is in the pipeline at Absolutely Skint, check out P For Pistol — a 2D shooter that's been in the works since Galaxy Raiders proved I could actually finish something.
