By Daniel Brame (Dr. Brane) of Crash Continuum LLC

Space Invaders, from the other side of the screen.

You are the swarm. Fifty-five invaders in five rows, descending on the human world of Gradilaxia at the command of the Overmind Queen. The lone ship at the bottom of the screen isn't yours — it's the boss, a hopelessly generic anime hero sent to stop you, and the Queen cannot tell any of them apart.

Written in Crash BASIC.

Playing from source

Crash BASIC games, when not packaged into a binary distribution, use the CrashPlayer runtime which can be downloaded from Crash BASIC Arcade. Mobile verisons are available too, but tend to lack a version behind current. A week is typcially enough time for the publishing process to catch up. This was written in 1.57.3 which is hot off the press with bug fixes, but it should be playable under mobile soon.

After installing, you can launch the game through the UI by picking the folder or the compressed crashcart (game bundle) format.

Fair warning.  The code is... not great.  It started great and then rapidly devolved as I got closer to the game jam submission.

https://github.com/Crash-Continuum-LLC/your-new-overlords

How a level plays

Each stage is a slow descent through open space. The minimap in the top-right is the whole level top to bottom, with your fleet travelling down it as you go.

During the descent you fend off two kinds of regular enemy:

• Orb drones streak in from the side, park in the lower band, fire a vertical laser up through your formation, and run.
• Missiles climb slowly from the bottom edge in a straight line. One that reaches your fleet takes an invader with it.

Both can be shot down by your own invaders' fire.

Near the bottom, ALERT — HERO APPROACHING flashes, the starfield reverses, and the boss streaks past you on his way in. He has something to say about it. Then the fight.

Controls

Action	Keyboard	Gamepad
Select a column	← / →	d-pad ← / →
Frenzy	A	Y
Shield	S	A
Overload	D	B
Advance, start, retry	Enter / Space	X

Note the keyboard and pad letters differ — keyboard A is Frenzy, but pad A is Shield. Both routes go through the same GAMEPAD MAP table in main.bas, so the on-screen touch pad on mobile behaves identically.

Psychic energy

Your invaders draw power from the Overmind Queen. You have 200, it regenerates steadily, and it is the only thing standing between you and a very short game.

You apply a mode to one column at a time:

Mode	Cost	Lasts	What it does
Normal	free	—	invaders take the occasional pot shot
Frenzy	15	4s	the column turns red and fires hard
Shield	25	5s	three columns become untouchable — its own and the ones either side
Overload	40	1.5s charge	the lowest invader vibrates white, then detonates

Overload is the big one. The charged invader unleashes a beam straight down and takes its eight neighbours with it. Land it square on the hero — within about 90px — and it costs him half his health; anywhere else and it's a fifth. So it rewards reading where he'll be, not just spending the energy. Shoot the charging invader before it goes off and the whole thing fizzles, energy spent.

Spending your own swarm is the point. Run out of invaders and the run ends.

The three heroes

They all look alike to the Queen. They are not, in fact, the same person.

Stage	Hero	Options	HP
Leaving the Alien Planet	Captain Yuusha	0	100
The Warp Conduit	Lt. Erica Random	2	140
Gradilaxia	Gen. Eric	4	180

Each is faster than the last and brings more Noptions — orbiting escorts, in the Gradius sense, that trail behind him and add their own laser to the barrage.

Testing hotkeys

DEBUG_HOTKEYS at the top of src/levels.bas enables three shortcuts. Set it to FALSE to strip all of them.

7	skip to the end of the stage — the boss sequence starts
8	wipe the swarm — game over
9	drop the boss instantly

Source layout

File
main.bas	screen and layer setup, the game loop, minimap
levels.bas	level and hero table, the boss encounter sequence, title/win/lose screens
invaders.bas	the fleet, column selection, the four attack modes
enemy_ship.bas	the boss ship, its Noptions, its AI
enemies.bas	orb drones and missiles
starfield.bas	parallax starfield and backdrops
dialog.bas	portrait dialogue boxes
hud.bas	psychic energy and boss HP meters

License

The game source code is public domain, dedicated under CC0 1.0 Universal. Take it, change it, ship it, no attribution required.

The assets are not. Nothing in src/assets/ is covered — bring your own, or clear each piece separately. See LICENSE for the breakdown.

Credits

Made by Daniel Brame (Dr. Brane). Published by Crash Continuum LLC, which holds the CC0 dedication on the source and the copyright on the artwork.

All pixel art is mine, except as noted below. Artwork copyright 2026 Crash Continuum LLC, all rights reserved — the code is public domain, the art is not.

The hero mug shots, the title art, the Overmind Queen, the alien planet and Gradilaxia were generated with GPT2 and then edited by hand. The warp conduit is entirely mine. There were made as generically as possible on purpose, and while I did edit them, I'm not going to quibble over copyright for those since the queen herself can't tell them apart anyway.

Some of the music was composed originally in FL Studio, with Suno used to create variations on those compositions, and some of it is prompt slop due to willfull procrastination. I'm licensed to use the Suno output commercially, but it isn't copyrightable by me — so it isn't mine to place in the public domain. The original compositions behind it are mine, and aren't shipped here.

The in-game font is Gradius, Gradius 2 TTF by Genshichi Yasui, free to use. An apt one to land on, given where the Noptions come from.