Hey there, this is Fernando, the XenoStar designer. Lots of work going on, but here’s an update.
First, our beta has officially started!
We’d love for you to test it and give us some feedback. Currently, these are the Beta features:
Game Notes
- There’s 4 weapons right now:
- – Upgradable Pulse Cannon (infinite ammo)
- – Homing Missiles (limited ammo)
- – Flamethrower (limited ammo)
- – Nova Bomb (limited ammo) — Purple balls of fury.
- There are 3 functional ships (Soldiers, Wasps, Swarmers).
- There are 4 difficulty modes.
- Shooting asteroids get you crystals which in turn heal you.
- Control the ship with WASD to move and the mouse to aim. Left-click attacks, use Q and E or roll the middle-mouse button to change weapons.
The premise of the gameplay is simple: You shoot and kill things. We wanted the game to be the quintessence of an arena shmup, but with the enemies shooting back at you. Like other games of the genre there’s no real ending – it lasts until you die, so you try to get the highest score possible. As you kill stuff you build up a Chain that increases your score multiplier, which drops to 1 if you’re hit so, in order to build a high score, you need to have good maneuverability. There’s also four difficulty levels – easy, medium, hard and extreme. These control the overall pace of the game. Easy is very casual and slow, hard is considerably, well, harder than normal, and extreme is close to bullet hell. While you do not die instantly to any hit in any of the difficulty modes, in Extreme (and to a lesser extent, Hard) you have a very limited health pool and taking a full salvo from any ship will mean death. Normal and Easy modes are considerably more forgiving in that aspect.
What We Want From You:
- Please report bugs to us (by email to dreamnauts@dreamnautstudios.com would be best) — If the game crashes and you get a screenshot of the error dialog that would be great.
- Every feedback is appreciated.
- Tell us what you think of the challenge presented, and how it suits you (easy, and I like it, hard and I don’t like it this way, easy and I don’t like it, etc).
- How far can you go before dying? Send us your scores, kills, etc.
- Completely optional but if you want, feel free to give ideas or suggestions.
- Most important: Did you have fun? If not, what are your complaints?
Second, some eye-candy! These are some renders of the Jumbo-Scorpion, the upcoming first boss of the game, which should be present in the next Beta release:
The ship is considerably bigger than anything else in the game so far, and looks really neat. There should be some screenshots of it in-game in the upcoming days.
Again, if you have Beta feedback, please send an e-mail to dreamnauts@dreamnautstudios.com.
Thanks!