Xona Games Title Accepted Into XNA Game Studio Contest
Nova Scotia – Indie studio Xona Games has announced that their arcade shooter Duality ZF has been accepted into Microsoft’s Dream Build Play 2009 Challenge. Duality ZF is an original Xbox 360 arcade shoot’em up featuring 4x multiplayer and dual play being developed by twin brothers Jason and Matthew Doucette. Following their philosophy of “Give the power to the player. The game’s difficulty should arise from enemy strength, not player weakness,” Duality ZF will be playable by anyone of any skill level.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TkG6J2CWvU]
Game Features as listed on the game’s website:
- DUAL PLAY lets you control both fighters with the left and right thumbsticks. The d-Pad also controls the “left” fighter.
- DUAL PLAY is optional. Use it only if you want. Solo play is default.
- DUAL PLAY is for beginners and experts alike. Beginners should dual play in the easy modes. Our weakest beta tester, who never plays video games, beat stage one with dual play.
- DUAL PLAY is not difficult to grasp in gameplay. All our beta testers managed it within a few game plays. It turns out, most Xbox gamers are already used to controlling each thumb independently for independant purposes.
- DUALITY ZF is not an expert-only bullet hell (danmaku, bullet curtain) shoot’em up. Anyone can play it. A four year old beat stage one in the easiest mode, including the intimidating end boss you see in the YouTube videos.
- DUALITY ZF allows eight independently controlled fighters on the screen at once, a shoot’em up first. This is possible via four players each using dual play. The impact of eight times the firepower blew us away, and forced us to offer additional unlockable difficulty modes to challenge such extreme gameplay.
- DUALITY ZF grows to match the skill of every player on the planet with unlimited unlockable difficulty modes. These unlockable modes will be untainable by the average solo player, but are a bonus to elite players. Elite players will have a “bullet hell” style experience, but this is out of the ordinary. We are excited to see gameplay captures of these most elite players.
- DUALITY ZF scoring system awards points proportional to the enemy strength and attack. The same scoring formula used for all difficulty modes. If the enemy is twice as hard to kill, you get twice the points. The scoring system does not “care” about, or factor in, the difficulty mode, only how tough the enemies are. It was important to make scores from all difficulty modes compatible, and we acheived this.