What's up, astronauts? (that's a trick question, there's no "up" in space) We're happy to announce we're looking at releasing our very fresh vertically scrolling shoot'em up Xenoraid for iOS devices (iPhone and iPad, AppleTV remains to be seen) in December 2016. We released the game on Steam in September, and the PS4 and Xbox One versions will be out in November. It's a pretty cool game! Xenoraid was born out of yearning for a good, "old fashioned" vertically scrolling space shooter that is NOT an insane bullet hell game for cyborgs. In fact, we went as far in our design goal of mitigating level memorization and insane bullet pattern dodging skillz requirements that we're driving the missions procedurally and the enemies act fully dynamically on AI. It's not an any kind of a roguelite or anything like that, as it's a fully linear mission based campaign + endless survivals, but the point is that you don't need to memorize the levels because you can't. The other main highlight of the game is the laserlike focus on shooting. Like, Xenoraid is all about shooting, because it's a shoot'em up. This manifests itself in a couple of ways. Firstly, aiming is a big part of shooting, so we made the bold decision to make the player's starfighters tilt slightly left and right when moving sideways. So you can shoot somewhat diagonally, but you also need to have a bit of pilot's grasp of where your fighter's nose is pointing, as that's where your main weapon bullets will go. What's more, you can't spray and pray without a care in the world, as the main weapons will overheat and lock up eventually. So what you'll be doing is lining up shots, squeezing out somewhat controlled bursts, and hopefully getting sweet "Nailed that one!" feelings when you see your bullets hit home. There's also a quite cool feature where your "lives" are actually your squadron of four fighters, and you can switch between them during missions at any time. You can do useful stuff with fighter switching, such as preventing a damaged fighter from getting destroyed, bringing in another fighter with cool guns, bringing in another fighter with shots left in the secondary heavy weapon to take out some big enemies, and "dodge rolling" out of a hairy situation (both incoming and outgoing fighters are briefly immune to damage). The fighter switching ties into the metagame too, as the metagame is about managing your squadron with upgrades and repairs. You don't want to end up using a lot of credits replacing lost fighters! Here be the trailer (don't mind the co-op bit. It's for PC and consoles only). Subscribe to the TouchArcade YouTube channel The iOS and Android beta opportunity signup is at http://xenoraid.com/ (scroll all the way down). Please note that we won't be able to invite everyone to the beta, but we will invite dozens of people.
Beta signup now active The iOS and Android beta signup is now active at http://xenoraid.com/ Scroll all the way down.
I've gotten to see some videos and a few of my friends play it, and it looks like a fun game. Good luck with the testing, hope the game comes to iOS soon I've always had a thing for procedurally generated maps in games. Signed up for the beta
Yes, we'll do controller support for both iOS and Android. Which actually reminds us about those non-analog stick MFi controllers, will need to look into those too.
We're working, and I'd expect to have a first beta version this week. Whether or not we'll send out that version to beta testers remains to be seen. But certainly I'd think we'll have a beta out in about two weeks.
Fellow starfighter pilots! What we're dealing with here is a classic case of good news and bad news. As we're all tough space men and women, I'm sure we all want the bad news first: The game won't be released in December. Instead, we're looking at a release date of January 12th. December is simply such a busy season that it's pretty much certainly worth it to sit on the game a couple of weeks more to secure a less crowded launch date. The good news is we've entered the first 50 testers into the beta, and now we're just waiting for the beta version to clear approval. That shouldn't take long at all. In the meantime, please check out the delightfully superbly received Neon Chrome! You still have time to get it at the -50% launch price.
We have added 50 more testers to the beta just now. Please check the game out and let us hear what you think!