I took over Shippy 1984 a while ago. I’ve been wondering about updating the graphics or adding new features. Recently I watched a history of the arcades and it talked about cute 'em ups. I’d never heard the term. I wondered if a cute reskin of Shippy 1984 might be interesting. I did a mockup with the two players bantering at the start of a wave.
I’ve hacked the code the allow for new graphics and animations. Not sure about the duck enemy. I’m not good at making “cute” pixel art.
It appears the allegro version of Shippy 1984 doesn’t work under Wayland. Not sure if it works under X. I was debating whether to keep support for it but if it doesn’t work I just going to remove it.
I’ve created a dev log video about converting Shippy 1984 to a cute look.
I decided at the last minute to put this on my arcade machine. We were bringing it to a science fest for our linux user group booth. I quickly modified it to switch between the cute and old graphics on a couple of the screen. This allowed me to show the original and the new cute look.
It worked amazingly well as an example of what open source can do.
I’m a bit late to the party. But it looks good. And I’m sure it will be the center of attraction on the booth. 
As part of my continuing attempt to finding funding for open source game work, I’ve made Shippy 1984 available for purchase at dulsi.itch.io. This is the cute modification that is not available in github at the moment. The plan is to release the changes to github after a short period of time. The source is available with the binaries.
It still doesn’t have all the changes I want to make. I’d like a villain portrait to mock you when you lose, add more powerups, a vertical scrolling segment and a boss battle.
See the Shippy 1984 trailer.
Added a new game over screen. Here is an example.
It also support two controllers now instead of second player being restricted to the keyboard.