XENON Windows, Mac game

Thanks to the feedback to our Polish Release. XENON has come to its final release - gold release. Today we are more than excited to share with you what’s new in the gold version. We will finally release our game this Tuesday (April 23, 2019) at EECS 494 Game Design Showcase at UM. You are always welcome to share your idea on our game with us!

What’s New? What’s the Motivation?

Bug-free! Bug-free! Bug-free! This has been the main focus of this week’s iteration.

Mechanism

• What’s new: Optimization on storage area judgment. We introduced new airwall colliders so that the judgment can be more accurate. Motivation: We hope this will fix the minor bugs on judgment before.
• What’s new: Fix energy consumption bug. Before, when you were depositing energons in your team’s storage area, energy is actually consumed. And this has led to potential issues where you cannot burrow down immediately after you deposit the energons. Motivation: This is a bug in the previous iterations. Also, it tries to deal with the reported issue: the player wants to burrow down without defense mode even though he/she doesn’t have energy.
• What’s new: Rebalance the energy consumption mechanism. We modified the energy consumed for burrowing and dash. Motivation: After deliberate consideration, we think it might be confusing to differentiate between burrowing down with and without defense mode (a lot of fresh-hand players are not accustomed to using burrowing down as defensive mode, and it will make it more confusing to differentiate). In order to tackle this problem in another direction, we rebalanced energy consumption for burrowing down and dashing.
• What’s new: Fix the game outcome judgment bug. We’ve witnessed some cases where one team should win but the system judges the two teams as draw. Motivation: A vital bug to be fixed.

UI

• What’s new: New animation for the energy bar. Now there will be a zoom-in effect on the energy bar to seize the players’ attention. Motivation: Some players report that they didn’t take notice of the energy bar. We hope this modification will catch their attention.
• What’s new: New animation for the tutorial font. There is a blinking animation to emphasize the force charging mechanism in throwing. Motivation: during playtesting, we notice only a small portion of the players notice the charging mechanism in throwing.

Next steps

Showcase! Showcase! Showcase! April 23 from 7pm to 9pm @ Umich BBB building. Please join us at this great show!