You are BIPBIPBOY! A little robot on a mission to defend the galaxy from a terrifying invasion of weirdly smiling, spinning, and... boxing, alien forces.

Fight 8 waves of deadly enemies with your powerful projectiles! Defeat enemies who drop pickups that allow you to switch weapons, from a simple bullet, to a wide reaching spread shot, or to a direct and powerful laser beam.

Can you reach the final boss, and survive its relentless barrage of bullets? Take down the final challenge, and do it over again to get a better high score!

Controls

Move BipBipBoy left and right using arrow keys, or left and right on a D-pad. You have one button to fire your weapon. And thats it! Collect weapon drops to change weapons, and hearts to regain life.

Development

BipBipBoy was developed as a small hobby project by a grown up nerd who has had an obsession with video games for nearly 40 years, with a particular love for Nintendo Gameboy and the crude simplicity of games on consoles such as the Atari 2600. He now aims to learn (and struggle) to develop his own.  

It was developed in parallel to following through the Lazy Devs Shmup tutorial series on YouTube. After several restarts, missing the game jam deadline, long pauses, side tracks and personal excuses, his version of the Shmup was finally completed in January 2026.

The beauty of this tutorial was that it guided participants to develop a classic "galaga-style" game, but while always encouraging personal experimentation and exploration of the code, to shape a game that is of individual design.

BipBipBoy was designed to resemble a classic DMG Gameboy game, with a basic 4 colour green palette, utilising the "secret" alternate PICO-8 colours, accessed with a palette swap code.

Not being a gifted pixel artist, the focus was on simple, charming, chunky sprite design, with animations to bring them to life. Twinbee and "cute 'em ups" were a big influence, while Sony's AstroBot was the direct inspiration for BipBipBoys animated turn and greeting toward the camera. "Bip Bip" is meant to both represent the sound you might hear when shooting bullets, but also as a reference to a cool bar / arcade in the local capital city of Copenhagen.

PICO-8

I tried out mainstream game engines like Unity, but found them to feel too much like the software I use in my day job! I wanted something specifically to make handheld, retro style games that remind me of childhood, and PICO-8 was perfect for that. It reminds me of simpler times from the early 90s, when I had a ZX-Spectrum and Atari consoles. It has a very toy-like and cosy interface.

PICO-8 has all the tools you need to make small games, but its very honest in that everything needs to be coded - collisions, game feel, physics, graphics - all that needs to come from the creator. But its incredibly satisfying to make all that work, and understand how it works. It gives you complete control over every aspect of the game. I am also prone to over-investing time into my projects, and PICO-8 has a very deliberate file size limitation to help reign that in. This game actually reached the token limit and I had to figure out how to optimize, which I think is a very important and useful skill to develop as a programmer.

Credits

This tiny PICO-8 game was created by Simon Wilson. Follow me on Instagram!

The games concept, "juice" and polish, I give huge thank you to Krystian Majewski and his amazing Shmup tutorial series, at his YouTube channel, Lazy Devs.

In-game music was provided as a resource to the tutorial series, by Sebastian Hassler.

Feedback!

I am doing this for fun, for curiosity. I want to make more games. I have personally play tested this many times, but in isolation, so I have no true sense of what works and what doesn't work with other players. Please be honest and let me know what is working and what could be improved. I am open to updating this game, but also want to take learnings for future small games too. Many thanks for playing!