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[Xonatron]

Score Rush Extended 撃点 (PS4)

Download:

$8.39 PS+ (30% off)
$9.59 PSN (20% off)
$11.99 regular

PlayStation.Blog Reveal:

North America
Europe

PS4 Announce Trailer:





Animated GIF:



Platform:

PS4

Release Date:

North America: May 31, 2016
Europe: June 2, 2016 (EN)
Europe: June 13, 2016 (FR, DE, IT, ES)
Japan: TBA

Genre:

Shmup, shoot 'em up, STG, 2D shooter, overhead shooter, etc.

Box Art:

Contact:

xona.com/contact

Web:

xona.com/scorerush
playstation.com

Social Nets, RSS, Wiki:





Goal:

To make the most fundamental and philosophically pure shoot 'em up ever. To make a game that truly tests how good we are at dodging and shooting enemies. To properly represent and respect the shoot 'em up genre, which was the top video game genre before FPS. To attract mainstream gamers back into retro-style arcade action competitive score-running gameplay. I have a true love for shmups.

Description:

A widescreen bullet-hell dual-stick overhead-view 2D scrolling shooter. Originally an experimental game released on Xbox LIVE Indie Games and became the #1 game in Japan. Locally cooperative, globally competitive. Play alone or with your friends -- as a team! -- to compete against scores from other single player and multiplayer teams.

Philosophy:

Empower the player. Increased challenge comes from increased game difficulty not player weakness. Allow domination. Never let the game be at fault for player death. Reward domination. No gimmicks. No hidden points or bonuses. To get the highest score, dominate the game (kill everything as fast as possible). Example, does saving your bombs help kill enemies faster? No, so saving bombs does not award extra points. Requires a scoring mechanic designed to measure the actual domination of game.

Art Style:

Gray-scale background and rainbow colored foreground. Aesthetically pleasing and strongly differentiates ground and sky layers, even when screen becomes crowded with enemies and bullets. Extreme intensity in player power up and enemy attacks. Massive satisfying explosions.

#1 in Japan:

Score Rush (Xbox 360), the "prequel" to Score Rush Extended (PS4), was #1 in Japan in the best sellers listing of all Xbox LIVE Indie Games, and #2 in U.S. and Canada. It was also #1 in Japan in ratings too, however our game Decimation X3 stole this distinction for itself (they were released 2 days apart) and pushed it to #2.

Screenshots:


Title screen.


Main menu.


Beginning of game.


4 players. Locally cooperative, globally competitive. Play as a team to compete with other teams on the scoreboards.


Those are four hitboxes, still rendered despite the (very quick) blinding explosion from a boss kill. Keep in mind this is a split-second screen capture, the game never appears this way to the gamer. Even in this split-second, we still adhere to our philosohpy of empowering the player and never letting the game be at fault for player death.


4 players, 4 colors. Color-coded powerups seak even distribution, although players are free to collect as they please.


Collect trailing options and coalesce them to form a powerful laser.


Boss explosion

Newer Screenshots:


Title screen.


Fire spots on the ground.


Fire spots on the destoryed boss, which is falling to the ground.


Fire spots on the destroyed boss on the ground,
which matches the gray-scale background art style upon crashing.


Fire spots on a damanged, but living, boss.
Notice the ground is colored in Boss Rush mode.


Fire spots everywhere!


4 Player Dual Play - each player controlling 2 fighters.

Older Screenshots:

These are older screenshots, back when the game was still titled, "Score Rush".

Older Score Rush [Extended] screenshot.


Older Score Rush [Extended] screenshot.


Older Score Rush [Extended] screenshot.


Older Score Rush [Extended] screenshot.


Older Score Rush [Extended] screenshot.


Older Score Rush [Extended] screenshot.


Older Score Rush [Extended] screenshot.


Older Score Rush [Extended] screenshot.


Older Score Rush [Extended] screenshot.


Older Score Rush [Extended] screenshot.


Older Score Rush [Extended] screenshot.

Note the above screenshots are older. Posted for comparison reasons.
They lake the new gray-scaled monochromatic background effect
mentioned in the art-style section.

Questions / Comments / Criticisms ?

Feel free to ask and share! Constructive criticism welcome.

I am new at devlogging. Be kind. Please let me know if this first post should be constructed differently.

That is all for now.

#shmup!

[Xonatron]

New PS4 box art (512x512):

What do you think?

P.S. It is like an optical illusion (visual phenomena?), as the box art does not look square to me.

[DaveVoyles]

The art looks great.

Consider condensing the distance between characters in "EXTENDED", so that it isn't so wide.

There is a lot of white space up top, so if you consider increasing the font size, you can always push the text towards the top a bit.

[Xonatron]

Makes sense. This box art has no content, so the title fills it up. But in my upcoming box art which has ships firing at each other, then I can move the title out of the way.

[Xonatron]

Our new box art prototype:

What do you think?

One point: We wish to showcase that Score Rush Extended is #1 in Japan video game, a title achieved on the previous Xbox 360 release. Just to make someone think twice and consider why it ranked so high in Japan.

EDIT: Minor update. Moved the title higher.

[Xonatron]

New box art:

[Xonatron]

Hopefully this is the last one, I am fairly happy with this latest box art. I even put it up against some pretty formidable indie game box art (with art so amazing I cannot compete) and it did not look too bad:

I am still interested in all comments and criticisms!

Thanks!

[Xonatron]

We just received some fan-made improvements to our box art:

"I had some free time so I added some bullets effect in the new box art for the PS4."
- Redmar Belle

What do you think? Does it look better with all these bullets firing?

[Xonatron]

Got PS4 Activity Feed working last night! What kind of Activity Feeds do you think Score Rush Extended should post? For now it posts when you beat your own high score, when you beat a friend's high score, and when you unlock the next difficulty modes (by beating the game in the previous difficulty mode).

[Xonatron]

Version 3 of our box art:

What's new:

• Award seal sticker, exclaiming "#1 in Japan", high quality art, much better than pure text.
• Xona games logo.
• Re-positioning of all the elements.
• Removal of boss ship.

P.S. Marty McFly goes to the future tomorrow!

[Xonatron]

Have PS4 online scoreboards working. No screenshots at the moment, still fine-tuning their design.

[Xonatron]

Big news:

Score Rush, the prequel to Score Rush Extended, was picked as one of "the best shmups to get started" by RacketBoy:
http://www.racketboy.com/retro/shooters/the-best-shmups-to-get-started

RacketBoy is one of the top retro gamer websites and communities.

Score Rush was in the company of iconic shmups, such as:
- Thunder Force
- Raiden
- Cave shooters (considered by some of the most hardcore shmup fans to be the best shmups ever)
- Gradius

To be in such company. Insane.

The few indie shmups mentioned included:
- Touhou
- Jamestown
- Score Rush!

What honorable company. Even our Decimation X series was mentioned as a suggested follow up!

P.S. Another great shmup 101 guide by the same author and site:
http://www.racketboy.com/retro/shooters/shmups-101-a-beginners-guide-to-2d-shooters

[eyeliner]

Honestly, the boxarts are a bit on the weak side.

I'd prefer to see the players' sprite in it's correct angle, (top down view), starfield/cloudy space/whatever on the background.

I'd say that the title menu, with the player sprite(s) and a bit of tweaking would be just about perfect.

[Zizka]

I'm curious.

What do you mean exactly by #1 Japan ? It's the most popular game in Japan ?

[Xonatron]

eyeliner,

Thanks for your feedback.

It is interesting, as the original Score Rush (Xbox 360) box art used in-game art with the title screen as the logo:

The original Score Rush (Xbox 360) box art.

To compare it to gameplay, watch the trailer here:


(original Xbox 360 version)

However, I found this box art to be a bit weak, to use your wording.

Do you like it better?

[Xonatron]

Zizka,

The original Score Rush (Xbox 360) was #1 in Japan in sales upon release, and would have been #1 in Japan in user ratings (was #2) had it not been for our own Decimation X3 release taking the #1 spot. Decimation X3 was released just 2 days before Score Rush, so we somewhat burned our own glory there.

"#1 in Japan" became one of the quick ways to explain the value of Xona Games, as we had three games rank #1 in Japan in user ratings and sales. This was every game we released on Xbox 360. One was Score Rush, and the others were two of our Decimation X releases.

Eventually we held 3 of the top 5 spots in Japan in user ratings, and our top title at #1 was bumped down with a release by Yuzo Koshiro (of Sega Genesis and SNES music fame)! It was an honor to be beaten by his work!

And since Score Rush Extended is more of an "extended" version to the game than a truly different "Score Rush 2" sequel, I wish to use this honor in the marketing. I would appreciate any input on how to do this.

(P.S. A sad note is that we were targeted for rating manipulation -- we were hacked "off" the top spots in the Xbox LIVE user rated rankings -- twice! So our rankings no longer exist. And when we were hacked off the top rated lists, our sales figures dropped which killed our spots on the top selling list and destroyed our income. Some indie devs here might remember this issue within XBLIG years ago.)

[Xonatron]

Zizka, it's ironic that your Twitter is "STG" as that's what our games are known as in Japan. STG = ShooTing Game or ShooTer Game, which equals shmups or shoot 'em ups here. I have run into it enough that I now see STG this way. To get "hits" from Japan, we should be using STG much more in our materials.

[Xonatron]

Just finished up a lot of PS4 optimizations, and graphic glitches (minor stuff) some of which was even in the previous X360 release. Nothing to show for now!

[Xonatron]

Learning how to make animated GIFs. Here's my first one.

Not the best, but a start.

2.48MB in size.

I used GifCam:
http://blog.bahraniapps.com/gifcam/

[Zizka]

Just to be clear, do you mean that your game outsold every single video game in Japan? Squarenix ? Nintendo ? Kojima ? Capcom ?

It's interesting. It only takes about 1,000 views to out do 50% of the dev logs posted here. It shows where average is, and how little it takes -- really, no offense -- to be better than average.

I think you're simplifying statistics a bit. It's not so simple I don't think for many reasons namely:

a. Not everyone updates their devlogs at the same frequency and therefore end up bumped into oblivion faster than others = less views.

b. Lots of the projects have been abandoned (they're not part of the active games anymore and therefore can't really be taken into account when comparing your game with other active ones).

c. Some games started updating regularly and have quite a following but ended up ultimately posting their progress elsewhere (tumblr for example).

d. Some games are actually very popular but because the author don't update often, they don't have as many views.

e. some games will get many updates in a certain time and then a just a few later on.

there are just too many variables to draw conclusions in comparison to other active games. You'd need to have better comparison points in order to find some correlation, right now it's just too abstract.

Edited out

Edited out

Also, I wouldn't recommend devlogs solely about news about views. I've never actually seen this before and, while it is interesting for you as the developer, it offers no real interest to people who are following your game. Perhaps you could include that information (if you deem it necessary) along with news about the actual game? I mean, technically anyone could constant bump their thread to talk about views (and therefore get more views in the process) but it really wouldn't prove much of anything as far as interest in the game is concerned). I personally think news about the game is what people care about (well, what I care about, many people dig those kind of messages).

Just a suggestion.