NEOGEAR - Cyberpunk Vertical Bullet Hell

[brettc]

I'm working on a cyberpunk vertical bullet hell shmup called NEOGEAR. It's inspired by Cho Ren Sha 68K, DDP, and the works of Tsutomu Nihei.

CURRENT STATUS: Caravan prototype released; full development beginning soon!

I'll post updates in this thread and keep this original post updated with the latest links and status of development!

On June 10, 2026 I released NEOGEAR -Summer Caravan '26-, a 2-minute time-attack mode for web, Linux, Windows, and macOS. It's a prototype for what I hope will become a full, multi-stage game.



Play the caravan mode: https://brettchalupa.itch.io/neogear-summer-caravan-26

The caravan release features scoring centered on collecting chips dropped by defeating enemies and cancelling bullets.

The key art and character designs are by Chromatic Arcana, and the game design, coding, and sound effects are by me. Music tracks from doranarasi, under their permissive license.

[brettc]

Here's a GIF of the gameplay from the caravan demo:



And here's a video of me playing through the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nS74zIcQaaE

I learned a lot making the caravan mode. How to improve visibility, balancing and tuning spawning schedules, and working with sprites in shmups. While I have made smaller games before, this is the most complex (and in my opinion, fun). I know I've got a lot more to learn, like how to program dynamic bosses with multiple parts, varied bullet patterns, and scoring/rank.

I made the game using Usagi Engine, which is a free and open source game dev tool I made. You code games in Lua and your game live updates when your code and assets does. This made for a really rapid development experience for the caravan mode. But as I prepare to start working on the full game, I will likely switch to coding it in Rust so that I can have better performance. I also prefer statically-typed programming languages and a compiler. There comes a point with scripting languages like Lua where it gets to be untenable and a hassle to work in for me.

I made my own schedule editor for the caravan demo. It's very utilitarian. Basically at any frame I can place which enemies spawn in a given lane. It's a hassle to work with, so I think I will make something slightly more robust for the ~5 stages I am planning for the full game.