This weeks’ episode is 40 minutes of a dinner meeting between Mark MacDonald (Editor: EGM), Erik Wolpaw (Writer: Portal), Dylan Cuthbert (President: Q Games) and Jonathan Mak (Creator: Everyday Shooter). This video is utterly fascinating. If you’ve never thought of game designers as artists, or of games as art, and these discussions don’t make you think twice about your stance, I can’t help you. The designers give insights into their varrying creative processes, talk of their past projects and even their gaming habits and what it’s like to play a game as a designer. Please, do yourself a favor and give this a watch. Also, feel free to comment with your thoughts and if I should keep posting things like this or not.

You’ll forgive me if I refer to Geometry Wars more than a few times. It’s just the most convenient point of reference that I have on hand. Anyway, in Everyday Shooter, like in Geometry Wars you will be navigating your way through a 2D board while avoiding shapes of all colors, shapes and sizes that are swarming around and toward you. Unlike in Geometry Wars, however, your objective is not to destroy as many enemies as possible, as quickly as possible. Rather, you’ll be attempting to set off a chain of explosions that will take out as many enemies as you can. By creating chains you will cause your fallen enemies to “drop” you points that you’ll then have to pick up manually. Bigger chains will net you larger point rewards, so take your time on setting them off.

Every time you destroy an enemy a note, a riff is played. This gives you the feeling that you’re contributing to the overall song. If you’ve ever played Rez on PS2 or Xbox Live Arcade (another Q Entertainment game!) you’re familiar with this concept. You even distort the music in fancy ways when you die; it sounds good! Each level you play presents a different method of setting off chain explosions, so most of the time you’ll be forced to mow through enemies that stand between you and your catalyst. So don’t let me dissuade you from shooting everything in sight; this can be equally if not more rewarding, and you’ll still earn a bunch of points by accident.

Perhaps my absolute favorite aspect of Everyday Shooter (besides the music, of course) is that it’s a Shmup that actually rewards you for the points you earn. With your first 200 points you’ll earn an extra life. After that, you’ll have to double your points for each additional life. Point rewards are more abundant as the level progresses as well as from level to level, though, so you never have too much of a wait between carrots. Points don’t stop being useful once you’re outside of a game, though. Everyday Shooter also has a rather sizable unlocks menu in which you can spend accrued points to increase the amount of lives you start with, or even extra levels. There are also some fun looking unlocks that I don’t understand yet; I have been unlocking extra lives as much as possible because each time you hit Game Over, you have to start from the first level again. This is my only small quibble with the game, but you quickly get over it because the earlier levels can be passed with increasing ease as you familiarize yourself with them. No big.

Everyday Shooter is, I believe, available exclusively on Steam for $9.99. I haven’t seen it anywhere else, but I’ll update this post if I do. There is also no demo available yet, but I hope that this write-up was enough to convince you that this game deserves to have money thrown at it.