Housemarque's top-down shooter Nex Machina on track for arcades
Finnish video game developer Housemarque is collaborating with Raw Thrills to create a sleek arcade cabinet for its top-down shooter, Nex Machina.
But that’s not the only thing happening on the project, with Housemarque releasing details on three updates it has added to the game: season structure, challenges and replay mode.
Season Structure: On top of the core game experience such as standard arcade and level modes, we want to create a more competitive environment for our players to interact in.
Lasting a specific amount of time (weeks or months), during the seasons you have an option to gain Ranks, Experience Points and Season Coins and compete against your friends or top people of the leaderboards.
Seasons also have their own set of different challenges for making your gameplay experience a lot more skill-based and long-lasting.
Challenges: The way that the game has been structured is, that all of the key-defining parameters for the gameplay are basically listed in these so called game rules, which then will be mixed and matched helping to create slightly different game experiences.
One example is the game speed, which can be adjusted to be twice as fast to really test how long you can survive – or you could have a challenge with enemy revenge bullets meaning that all the enemies would start spawning those, adding a new layer of reactive gameplay.
Replay Mode: This has been built into the game mainly for the community, allowing you to see other players runs and learn what makes them so good, which techniques they are using, and how do they approach and address difficult but rewarding situations.
All of the leaderboard entries are effectively recorded which makes it possible to enter to leaderboards, select an entry and watch the wanted replay.
The Nex team concluded:
We are quite proud that Nex Machina is very demanding game since it requires a lot of skilful playing. There are a lot of secrets, a lot of things to uncover and a lot of depth in the scoring system.
Because of all of these layers you could otherwise end up with a lot of unanswered questions, but instead of having players to google and search answers from there, we’d really like to encourage the extension of the experience to be integrated into the game.
