What happens when the world’s Super Villains follow through on their threats of world destruction? Well boredom mostly. Now the Villains and their dutiful minions roam around in Cloud Cities in the sky, all that remains after blowing up the earth. All that’s left to do is pummel each other into submission in an epic last-man-standing Battle Royale, to determine once and for all who is the greatest.
Our latest is an intense, action packed frantic sci-fi arena shooter with loads of enemies, upgrades, bullet time, boss fights and minion helpers. Inspired by Frantic Frigates and Death Vs. Monstars, we set out to make an arena shooter with as much mayhem and destruction as we could fit on the screen (without causing Flash to stop running).
I’d had this idea of creating a game where rather than playing the hero, you took on the role of the villain, but wasn’t sure how best to implement it. At first I wanted it to be an RPG where you had to commit villainous acts and earn notoriety, with the aim of world domination. At the time it felt a bit ambitious. But we liked the theme so began running with the idea. We tried molding it into a launch game but that felt forced. So we settled on a shooter. “Easy to pick up, difficult to master”. Shooters are the very definition of what makes a classic Flash Game.
Creatively we decided a side view arena shooter worked best, over a top down angle. Additionally, allowing the player to fly rather than walk over the ground felt more fluid and in touch with fast paced nature of the game. Rob came up with the cool idea of epic fights in cloud cities. We were always wary of opting for a space theme as its been done so many times so this provided a perfect alternative. In the end, we threw in a space level in anyway, but the variety in the background design gave it a different feel to similar games of this type.
Upgrades are always popular in Flash games so adding those in was a given from the start. There are only so many ways to upgrade your player in these shooter games – fire rate, weapon, speed you move around, money magnet etc. – so these come as standard. As such we wanted to bring something extra to the table that hadn’t necessarily been done before. Out of this we created Minions, little furry helpers to assist you on your Villainous rampage.
As usual, one the hardest aspects of the games development was the balancing. Too hard and you put people off before they’ve had a chance to dip their feet in, too easy and the seasoned gamers breeze through it in no time at all and complain it was too short. In the end, we toned down the difficulty slightly so it could appeal to a more general audience. But for those that want the challenge there is an Endless high score mode to keep people coming back for more.
Go forth, kick some ass and be the Baddest Villain you can be. Play Game.
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