Xtraction Point

Xtraction Point is an 2D pixel-style game of adventure genre. The game requires two players to co-operate to solve the puzzles in the scene. And also they need to fight against the traps and enemies in the levels. It describes a story happening in the universe, where there’s a scientist studying his creatures in the laboratory. Unfortunately, the invaders come and they occupies the lab. The players need to play the roles of mistorious creatures, who have special powers, to escape to the outside world.

The following video can give you a general idea what the game is like. We were a team, Laforce, who finally developed this game, and we decided to call it “Xtraction Point”. The platform is MacOS or Windows, and you may need two controllers to try this game. If you get interested, feel free to download the game!

Pixel-Art

Xtraction Point is made during my undergraduate major design course at University of Michigan, EECS494 Game Development. Thanks to the instructor and all my teammates, we succesfully completed the product. At the end of the course, we displayed Xtraction Point at the final exhibition and achieved the 7th player-most-like game among all 32 groups.

During development, I served as team leader for the 4-member group. As a game development, we of course need to create lots of art work, and thanks to Wenhui Zhao in our team, we can finally give a style-consistant 2D pixel game of a high quality. In the project, together with other two members, we designed and implemented all techinical parts in the games, including the interesting enemies AI shown in the left.

Cooperation

The game needs two players to coorperate with each other to figure out how to break one and another puzzles. One of the most interesting features in the game is the shield that held by each player. It can not only defeat bullets shot by traps, but can complete many incredible tasks. Try it in the game!

Be aware of traps!

As a technical engineer during game development, I have designed plenty of enemies and traps. Also to ensure the experience of players to be consistant and continuous, we need to spend much time on designing the whole game progress, including how to record player status and checkpoints, how to control the movement of camera and how to ensure two players will always stay in the same screen.

One of the features that I most like in my implementation is the laser gun in the scene. It took me several days to take advantage only three images to create a laser that can adjust the length of it based on the collision in front of the rifle.

Of course the shield will become a great help for players, but be aware, the laser will weaken the shield energy! We used to try to design an even more interesting feature that the shield can bump away the laser like a mirror, which may become the source of “teammate kill”. But the schedule was too tight and we finally left the half-implemented features. Maybe it will come in to the further levels in the future.

Enjoy!

It was a great time to work with my members to finally create the amazing game. We enjoyed making it! And I hope you can also enjoy the game if you want to try it! Thank you for dropping in!