The developers (Brain Slap Studios) of the XBLA and PC shoot em up Hexodius have kindly offered some insight into the development of the game with some developer diary moments to share. Some new screenshots have surfaced as well for this interesting take on the shoot em up genre as it includes dungeon crawler gameplay elements. For more info about the game take a look at the demo and store page on Steam.

Hexodius Dev Diary: Enemies to beat!

The Hexodius complex is filled with a lot of threats. The first droids you will encounter may not look very smart at first sight (as they will not hesitate to crush their self on you), but be careful, to serve their greater goal many different models have been designed to give you a lot of trouble. Here are the portraits of some of them out of the 25 different types:

Depending on their type they can shoot, dodge, block, heal, dash … You will have to learn how to avoid their attack and find their weaknesses. To achieve that, the use of the right tactic and the right equipment can help a lot:

Dev Diary: Arena design

When we started to work on the arena gameplay we had the classics of the genre in mind: Robotron 2084 and smash TV were the key influences. But to have more variety we decided to make three types of missions and to add gameplay elements in the arenas.

Here is what it looks like when we are adding gameplay elements in an arena :

This “Destroy” arena has two generators and two turrets to defend them.

The elements you will encounter in the arenas can be dangerous for you, but they will also affect the enemies, you can try to use them to your advantage.

In some “destroy” arenas generators are hidden behind doors you will have to open; of course in the meantime enemies will not stop to harass you.

Gates are open let’s destroy this generator !

But an arena battle is nothing without a tricky spawning of enemies. In the story mode it was really important to have a good variety and a good rhythm in the arenas, a tool with a timeline to edit the spawning of enemies has quickly become essential.

This arena has four spawning gates, the last track is to edit the “events” (like air strikes, rocks fall…).

Dev Diary: Let’s score !

To do a great score in Hexodius Arcade arenas, you need to do more than just survive and shoot at anything coming at you. You have to destroy a lot of enemies, gather a maximum of energy sparks and do a lot of bonus actions.

You have to quickly destroy enemy waves to increase the spawning level, when you are hit the enemies are cleared and the level does not increase. Avoid to be hit and try to quickly level up to have a huge crowd of enemies around you.

Energy sparks are worth a certain amount of points depending on their size (small, medium and big), try not to miss too much of them to optimize your score. The energy magnet upgrade or the energizer equipment can help you to grab more of the energy sparks, consider also the optimizer upgrade (20% of score bonus for energies) if you want to focus your score on this aspect.

We designed several “bonus actions” that will add points to your score, they have been designed to have you think about your customization setup in order to do a lot of them in a run!

Each weapon has its own bonus action, try to find how to do them to improve your score. Be sure to optimize all the weapons of your setup.

You can go in the main menu to check all the bonus actions, once you have perform one, its complete description is available. All enemies are worth a certain amount of red dots that are counting to do bonus actions.