Lovely to see this getting attention after nearly 10 years!
There was no real inspiration behind it - I don’t like shoot-em ups, especially R-Type (controversial I know) - it was purely that I hadn’t written one so thought I’d have a go. There’s no ‘bomb as well as laser’ because I simply didn’t know that was a thing - I just wrote what I wanted to play, not a copy of any existing game or style.
Likewise with the ASCII art - I thought it would be an interesting look to try, although that turned out to be the most difficult thing as there’s lots of pixel-based editors, but few few ASCII ones, and none I could find which handled the low ‘resolution’ I was working at.