Futuridium is a free, ultra-stylish shooter for PC and Mac from Italian indie development studio MixedBag, in which frugal space pilots must use their reflexes, wits and piloting abilities to destroy a series of massive alien capital ships.
The player's jet travels at a constant velocity, somewhat like a 3D version of Defender. Destroying blue cubes increases a score multiplier, with chains of enemies and cubes destroyed in sequence yielding an additional bonus in points. Once all the blue cubes have been destroyed, the capital ship's yellow power core is exposed and vulnerable to blastin'.
The game is also headed to Linux and iOS, in free and paid flavors respectively, sometime within the next few weeks and presumably at an uncontrollable, automatic velocity.
via Joystiq
Welcome to the Futuridium website!
Futuridium is a fast paced, action packed, classic shoot'em up with a modern twist. We developed the game for a contest promoted by the italian website Gameprog.it, and then decided to do do a full fledged product. We wanted to do a flat shaded, bright coloured 3d shoot'em up, with an heavy focus on scoring and some advanced special effects to enhance the visual impact, so we started with a couple of ideas:
- No special powers, no bonuses: only the player reflexes count. Your ship, your lasers, your ability!
- You can stop and turn your ship 180° at any time, just pressing a button
- All the levels are HUGE alien capital ships. You fly over them, under them, trying to destroy all the energy cubes (blue cubes), to reveal the main cube (golden cube) that keeps the ship flying.
- No speed control: you fly as fast as possible...
One of our main inspiration is the classic shooter Uridium by Andrew Braybrook. But in full 3D.
How to play?
First: you need a joypad or an analog joystick. Seriously: you can play with the keyboard but it's not the same thing. Just configure the buttons in the first option screen, any standard joystick/joypad is supported.
In every level you must destroy all the blue cubes to reveal the yellow cube. Destroy the yellow cube to advance to the next level.
Remember: using the U-turn button you can turn back at any time! Use it!
How does the score system work?
1) Destroy the blue cubes to up your multiplier: it's on the right, just under your score. When you die, your multiplier resets.
2) Destroy blue cubes in fast sequences to get a chain: the longer the chain, the better your bonus score when the chain stops!
3) Mix enemies to cubes in chains for even higher score!
Aim for the top of the online leaderboard!
The Futuridium beta is completely free: just download and play the beta.
The first version of the game, Futuridium EP, will be free too and will be out soon!
Thanks and enjoy Futuridium!
