Overview
Thanks to the feedback from our Alpha release, XENON has come to its public test β-version. Today we are more than excited to share with you what's new in the β-version and what the future steps will be.Again, the final version of our game will be released on April 23, 2019, at EECS494 Game Design Showcase at UM. You are always welcome to share your idea on our game with us!
What's New? What' the Motivation?
Theme! Theme! Theme! has been the main focus of this week's iteration. Also, advice on how to strengthen the juiciness of our game was greatly adopted in this version.
Now XENON!
We've changed our game's name from CodeX to XENON. You might ask us why we used the name CodeX in the previous iterations. The reason is simple: at that time we don't even know what kind of game we are going to make. CodeX is just the code name for our project (every game can be named after CodeX XD ). In this iteration, we finally had some time thinking over what our game scene is - the city is out of power, and the robots are collecting the XENON energons to relight the city. However, one side of the robots prefers the red light while the other the blue light, and the only way to decide which color to use is to win the game! The team with the more energons when the timer countdown is zero will light the city with their team color!
Mechanism
- What's new: We add a force charging mechanism for throwing your partner. Now there are three levels of force. Motivation: This will give the players more freedom to perform the throwing activity and will also increment the interest of combatting.
- What's new: We add a bonus time period, during which the frequency of energon appearance will be doubled and the time needed for storing the energons will be halved. Motivation: In order to make the game more balanced, especially in the case of overly accumulated advantage.
Juiciness
- What's new: New indicator sprites and animations introduced! Motivation: Since we introduce the new force charging mechanism, we need a corresponding indicator system.
- What's new: Slow motion camera introduced for memorial moments in the game. Motivation: We want to give the players more positive feedback when they perform a really rewarding throwing (drop a lot of enemies' energons). This will also enhance the experience of the game.
- What's new: Controller shaking mechanism added! Motivation: We believe the shaking of the controller will make the control more intuitive and will give the players more feedback.
- What's new: Audio instruction during the tutorial. Motivation: The players tend to skip the long sentences in our tutorial, hence, why not change the words into voice? This will also make the game feel more high-tech.
- What's new: Camera motion for scene transition. Now from tutorial to the gameplay mode, there will be juicy camera motion. Motivation: Juicy! Juicy! Juicy! This will also give the players some intuition about our game setting.
- What's new: Other minor changes for juiciness. In order to make the visual effects more consistent.
Next Steps
The next iteration of our game will be XENON-γ or the polished version, in which we will mainly focus on
- Fix all the bugs found.
- Strengthen the background universe. Now we have a story. We need to sell the story to the players.
- May introduce more mechanism to make the game more interesting and balanced.
