Hey everyone,
As promised last week, here’s a timelier blog update for you. This week we’re talking about our forthcoming PSN minis title, Duæl Invaders.
Duæl Invaders is a seriously old-school fixed-screen shoot ‘em up, mixing the classic formula seen in games like Taito’s Space Invaders and Namco’s Galaxian, with its own unique brand of simultaneous 2-ship control.
The game’s concept is centred on the idea of controlling two player ships simultaneously on a single PSP or PS3 controller across single player, and 2-player co-operative and adversarial game modes.
In all modes your ships (one red, one blue) are tasked with destroying wave upon wave of red and blue enemies; the idea being to survive, waste the bad guys and attain the highest score possible. Some of your enemies will cause chain reactions or change other enemies’ colours, so picking out the best shots will really help you survive and rack up those high scores!
Killing enemies with a like-coloured ship, builds the player’s Skew Rate (a mix of ‘score multiplier’ and ‘aggro meter’), awarding you massively boosted scores, and also massively increasing the enemy’s aggro towards the opposite-coloured player ship!
Its important to stress that while the ‘Skew Rate’ and colour matching is worth mastering, it’s by no means totally essential; you can just mash the buttons and kill everything in sight if you really want – this is a shmup after all! ;)
Like the player ships, all regular enemies in Duæl Invaders are red or blue. Enemy types and their behaviours are described below:
Grunts – Grunts are your regular cannon fodder. They fire at you every so often, and move towards your player ships according to your skew rate. That is all.
Horis –When killed, Horis (or Horizontals) destroy adjacent enemies on the same horizontal line within a limited range.
Verts – When killed, Verts (or Verticals) destroy adjacent enemies on the same vertical line within a limited range.
Rads – When killed, Rads (or Radials) destroy adjacent enemies in a limited 360-degree range.
Anti-Rads – When killed, Anti-Rads (or Anti-Radials for those of you who aren’t getting this yet!) change the colour of adjacent enemies in a limited 360-degree range.
Attackers – Attackers behave much like Grunts, but will periodically dive-attack the player ship of the same colour. Their aggression depends on the player’s current Skew Rate, but they can be a problem, so watch out!
Mother Ships – Mother Ships are passive enemies and are only there to destroy, so you can get your hands on the big bucks!
BTW, if anyone has any ideas regarding enemy names (the ones above are totally Work in Progress) send them in via the Comments section below. We’re more than happy to hear your (sensible!) suggestions. :)
That’s all for now. We’ll have more news on the game soon, along with some screenshots once things are looking a little sexier. Hope you like the sound of things so far!
Cheers until next week,
Al
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