Hey everyone!

This is Mike Rose from publishing label No More Robots, and I’m rather excited to announce today that Descenders, the downhill mountain biking game from Action Henk studio RageSquid, is coming exclusively to console on Xbox One in Xbox Game Preview!

We’ve spent the last two years building Descenders with one simple goal in mind: To create the most gorgeous, stylish and addictive freeriding game possible, filled with satisfyingly intense speed – and we can’t wait for you lovely Xbox people to get your hands on it.

What the Heck is Descenders?

Good question! Descenders is extreme downhill freeriding for the modern era, where you flip, whip and scrub through procedurally generated worlds, filled with the underlying awareness that a single bail could end it all.

We know that the MTB community has been crying out for a proper mountain biking game for years now, so we wanted to create an experience that both satisfies the hardcore freeriding fan, while also feeling like great fun even if you’ve only ever casually ridden a bike.

The game plays out across four unique worlds, starting in the Scottish Highlands, weaving through dense forests, opening out into gaping, humid canyons, before chucking you out of a helicopter on the highest and most dangerous mountain peaks.

Every single run feels fresh and new – that’s because each level is uniquely generated before you play, meaning that you never see the same level twice. Oh, and there are no upgrades or power-ups to collect; Instead, you must progress through skill alone, feeling yourself getting better and better as the hours are whittled away.

Rinse and Rep-eat

Everything you do in Descenders earns you “Rep” points. Simple jumps and slides will boost your Rep ever so slightly, but it’s the biggest tricks and fastest speeds that really earn you the big bucks. Looking to top that Rep leaderboard? You might want to, oh I dunno, try jumping over a moving train?

As you build your Rep, the risk vs. reward grows deeper and far more intense. See, every time you bail, you lose 1% of your total Rep. That’s not too bad when you’ve just started out… but when you each 250,000 Rep, those tumbles really start to add up. All of a sudden, racing down a mountain at 50mph dodging trees left and right becomes a real heart-stopper.

You’re not just building your Rep for yourself – Descenders is very much a team effort. Early on in the game when you’ve proven your skills, you’ll be approached by one of the core riding teams, who will want to sign you up. Team Enemy is all about sick tricks, Team Arboreal take their action off the beaten path, and Team Kinetic are the game’s speed demons.

Your Rep will then also go towards your team’s total Rep, and will determine which team has prevailed each Season, along with who will receive exclusive gear and bikes. Make sure you pick the team that’s right for you!

Suit Up

Speaking of gear: As you play through Descenders, you’ll start unlocking new bikes, thread and accessories to kit yourself out with. The threads you own at the beginning aren’t exactly mind-blowing, but as the sponsorships start rolling in, you’ll find yourself with a full wardrobe, ranging from super slick kits to, shall we say, some rather silly shirts and accessories.

The types of kits and bikes you collect are linked to your Rep score, so players who spend time building their skills will find themselves unlocking the best, most gorgeous kits. As you can see, there are plenty of reasons to build that Rep score.

There’s so much more to see in Descenders, including secret gap, shortcuts, and rare events that occur… but I’ll keep those all to myself for now. We don’t want to spoil it all before you’ve had a chance to play!

We can’t wait to get Descenders into your hands as soon as possible – and it will definitely be soon! We’re aiming to launch in Xbox Game Preview in the next several months, so watch this space.

See the rest of the story on Xbox Wire

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Starpoint Gemini Warlords is a space sim coupled with role-playing and strategy elements. Send your mighty war fleets into combat or lead them yourself. Explore a massive game world populated by over 60 diverse factions. Explore, trade, fight, lead, build, conquer, customize. Become a warlord!

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Wryn is the world’s greatest (and only remaining) hero. Help her battle an invading force of villains and live up to her title as the Greatest Hero of All Time!

• 7 levels containing over 25 boss fights.
• Unique controls let you shoot, dodge, reflect bullets and slow time all at once.
• 4 difficulty levels that remix enemy placement and boss patterns.
• Unlockable weapons, characters and abilities.
• Arcade Mode: Tackle the game on one life to compete for leaderboard glory.
• 2-player local co-op for all modes.

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Hi there! My name is Thomas Brush, and I’m the developer, artist, game designer, and musician for Pinstripe. I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to launch my game about a minister in Hell on Xbox One… to say it’s been a long road getting here is kind of an understatement, but what a journey it’s been.

On the tin, Pinstripe is a game about Ted, an ex-minister whose daughter, Bo, is kidnapped by a shadowy figure, and the lengths Ted goes to both get her back and confront… well, you’ll see. It’s a little bit action, a little bit puzzle, and a lot bit adventure-filled passion project that I threw half a decade of my life into making. It’s inspired by a lot of things, from growing up in the South to the works of the creators who have inspired me, and every inch of it was a learning process I relished, allowing me to explore the topics that interested me the most.

Every level of Hell in Ted’s strange adventure was meticulously designed over the course of five years. Ted’s Tim Burton-esque character design all started in Clemson University’s library and lecture halls. I’d often spend more time brainstorming the hellish world of Pinstripe instead of paying attention during lectures. It’s funny to think the final pieces of artwork in Pinstripe were dreamed up in the middle of my economics class, and even funnier to see just how much the final designs changed from the initial scrawl in the margin of my class notes.

During the illustration process, I had a blast writing a soundtrack that reflected the visuals. Instead of doing the obvious – writing fantasy music like that of Tim Burton’s films – I found inspiration in the works of Debussy and Chopin. The result was an eclectic, piano-centric soundtrack with a silly, bouncy vibe while also remaining haunting and cold. To ensure the music always reflected the chilling atmosphere of Pinstripe’s Hell, I made sure to always write my music with Pinstripe’s snowy scenery playing on my laptop across from my piano.

A couple years ago, being an indie game auteur came with bragging rights, but now, it’s becoming more and more of a necessity for indie devs across the world. With technologies like Unity, Logic Pro, Audacity, and Photoshop now a daily tool for most game developers, learning every aspect of game development is, in my opinion, absolutely crucial to making great games. For me, it ensures Ted’s strange adventure through Hell is unique, beautiful, and cohesive. Cohesiveness was always the goal with Pinstripe, and one of the reasons I decided to build the game from scratch, completely alone.

To me, the concept of fatherhood has always been a frightening one. My three older brothers used to hog the Xbox when we were growing up, but suddenly I was watching in awe as they became fathers while I was still in college. It was a topic I wanted to explore… that fear and responsibility, and how far you can be driven to go. Now, Ted’s deeply personal story of fatherhood is something I can fully appreciate, with the birth of my daughter just one month before Pinstripe’s Xbox One launch. It feels strange to relate to my game five years later more than I did while I was making it.

I’ve spent so many years working on handcrafting every aspect of Pinstripe by myself that letting it out into the wild, and sharing it with so many people, is both scary and wonderful. From the peaks of The Hangly Pass, to the depths of the fiery red lake of Red Wash, I like to think that Pinstripe has more to offer than enemies to shoot and puzzles to solve. I’ve been making games very nearly for all my life, and Pinstripe might be surreal, and maybe a little creepy, but it’s also something very heartfelt. It’s a story about death, family, and forgiveness that I hope resonates with you, even if just a little.

See the rest of the story on Xbox Wire

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Play as Teddy, an estranged ex-minister forced to venture through the frozen afterlife in search of his three-year-old daughter Bo, and her perverse kidnapper. Discover the dark secrets of Teddy’s past, and confront his sleazy, demonic nemesis, Mr. Pinstripe.

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We’re in a unique position here in New Zealand because there are very few big players in the games business over here. As a result, the indie scene has grown dramatically over the last few years with the industry hitting $100M dollars in revenue in 2017. What makes New Zealand’s game development interesting is the focus on creativity, so a lot of the games are original IPs. Most studios self-publish, as we have with Samsara. Having the opportunity to develop such a distinctive and enjoyable puzzle game has been a highlight of my career. NZ is a great place to make games!

For fans of puzzlers out there, Samsara is a unique 2D puzzle game set across two reflective dimensions. Players guide our character Zee safely through puzzles by manipulating reflective blocks within the different dimensions to reach the exit portals. We’re excited to bring Samsara to Xbox One as playing the game on a full HD screen is a fantastic experience – the atmosphere of the different dimensions really comes through and visually it’s a beautiful game. The puzzle mechanics and controls are very fluid which makes for an enjoyable experience, even if the puzzles themselves can leave you scratching your head!

We’re lucky to have worked with a fantastic animation and art team based in the UK. They totally understood the style we were aiming for and the contrasting moods between the reflective dimensions. We wanted the upper dimension to be relatively normal – I say “relatively normal” as we do go slightly Salvador Dali in later levels! However, by contrast, the lower dimension shows a darker, more ominous tone, where environments are dilapidated and eerie. It was fun to play with those ideas, showing the contrasts between good and evil, light and dark. The team surpassed our expectations on what we could create as we kept pushing and challenging each other.

We worked hard as well to make sure that the puzzle elements within Samsara are suitably enticing. Solving puzzles where you must get Zee and Zee’s inversed echo to multiple portals while swapping dimensions can be quite the brainteaser and adds so much complexity. It will get people thinking but can require some perseverance, without ever being frustrating. In addition, the game may get people thinking in other ways too, as it indirectly references the meaning of Samsara in Buddhism – the endless cycle of desire, death, and rebirth. The game symbolizes the rebirth through the six realms of existence and eventually nirvana, which is the true insight into reality. I find cultural philosophies very intriguing and being able to adapt them to a different medium for people to experience is cool.

See the rest of the story on Xbox Wire

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Earlier this year we introduced the development story of Little Triangle and how we made the first Xbox Play Anywhere game from China. In this article, we’d like to talk more about how we made sure Little Triangle is unique and fun.

We looked to meet modern players needs with proper difficulty management. With so many good games available nowadays, and busier lifestyles, many players have less time to spend on difficult hardcore games — but they want to experience all the good stuff in those games.

Oftentimes, players just cannot finish a game. And it’s boring if you can simply walk from the beginning to the end without some challenge. There is a well-known slogan: difficult but fair. However, even if a game is fair, players can usually feel frustrated and that’s not fun at all. We modified that principle to be “challenging but not frustrating.”

We put a proper number of checkpoints in each level, so that players do not have to go through the same place repeatedly and waste time. And for boss fights, we use health bars to manage the difficulty. For collectibles such as diamonds, if players have already collected the diamonds we will not force them to recollect again after a death. There are quite a lot of Easter Eggs and hidden collectibles in the game, so players will replay the game to find more Eggs and try for those achievements.

We also added a casual mode. Three health points were added at the start of each level, and if you lose some of the health points you can still get one more at the next checkpoint. So, health points are not free, and players still need to avoid getting hurt. Usually, players can finish a level under 30 deaths in casual mode. It’s very hardcore if you try to get the achievements in the hardcore mode.

The controls are extremely easy to pick up without having to really focus on learning them. But less means more. When the controls are simple, we need a variety of mechanics, countless kinds of enemies and well-designed boss fights to make sure it’s fun to play all the way. The three chapters of Little Triangle contain almost all the elements of 2D platformers.

We also included three gameplays in this game: classical single-player platformer mode, 2-4 multiplayer co-op and a mini Battle Royale with a lot of weapons and different maps! And the many offline tests we did, proved we were correct with a lot of the decisions we made. It’s a blast! We tested the game with a lot of players in China and the feedback was super positive. We recently finished quite a few tests with players outside of China and the feedback was the same! super positive.

To make a great game we have paid attention to a ton of details. When a triangle approaches something dangerous it will show fear. When it’s at the edge of a platform it will appear trying to balance. When it stays idle for a while it will show various kinds of animations. If you move quickly left and right, it will show a dizzy animation. There are hidden levels in the single-player mode, and you will find them well polished although most players may not see them at all! In the house of skins, you can even find a computer that supports quite a few commands! You will discover tons of details in the game and that’s why it has taken so much time and effort to develop. To sum it up, we are targeting Super Meat Boy’s quality, and you will soon find it a unique game for today’s players.

Here I would also like to answer a few frequently asked questions. Many players asked about whether we will support online multiplayer in the future. We certainly want to and it’s in our plan. For now, you can enjoy well-polished single player content if no one else is on the couch for the local multiplayer content. Some players wonder what Little Triangle is, and many players think it is nacho. We even thought about calling it Super Nacho because of the feedback. But people from diverse cultures may connect it with a different thing, such as rice dumpling and pizza. Inspired by player feedback, we made a lot of funny skins including food, triangular people, dinosaur and even poo, which are mostly hidden in the single-player mode chapters. All the activated skins in single player mode can also be used in multiplayer mode!

If you have a minute to spare, please check this video out from our offline recordings. Although players speak Chinese you can see the obvious excitement and happiness when they play. You may find the video recording of a preview that four members of the ID@Xbox team did on Mixer. You will hear the countless laughs they had during this one-hour stream. If you are interested to know more about the game, so please follow us on Twitter.

See the rest of the story on Xbox Wire

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