Expresso game studios, also responsible for Spooky Station and Nami will be releasing Railgunners, a shooter built to highly customizable difficulty levels, inspired by arcade classics from the 90’s but unbound by genre stereotypes, offering a new experience for shmup fans and a friendly jumping point for new players.
Railgunners is meant to be a jump point into the shoot’em up genre but also a fun replayable challenge for veterans, the main mechanics are built to make players stay on the offensive, learning to manage enemy patterns while dealing damage to keep advancing, cutting off 100% safe strategies to force the game to stay on fast choice making and interactivity.Play passive and you will be toast!
Each stage rewards the player with new tools to customize their playstyle, so they can shape the experience to their liking. Mods to make it easier to manage energy, tank damage or manipulate risk/reward dynamics, and weapons to deal with specific enemy combinations or rush damage tough foes; More hardcore players can also opt to not use those tools for organic challenges to test their grit.
With proper planning beginner players can potentially brute force some sections while learning the mechanics, avoiding the frustration of needing to master the game to finish it, so next time they can use the accumulated experience and aim for higher scores and experiment with different play styles
Randomized enemy spawns make every run wildly different, preventing players from going into memorized automatic choices, creating a gripping and entertaining experience every run, even on easier stages.
Features
- 3 playable characters with unique balancing and skills
- 17 Carefully handcrafted levels
- Branching paths to build your arsenal
- Procedural enemy placement, it’s not enough to mimic your past movements, learn to read the enemy and act accordingly
- Gorgeous Pixelart
- Customize your ship with weapons and mods!
- High replayability!
Why Early Access?
The current state of the game is very close to the final vision, but due to struggle of long independent game development time the felt would be ideal to expose the game to as many players as possible before hitting the last nails, it will also be important to decide on which type of extra content could be added to make it shine even brighter!
What more can you expect on the final version?
- Extra Bosses
- More Mods and weapons
- New game modes
- And more!
Railgunners will be available on Steam, Itch.io and gamejolt
Follow game updates at:
Steam page link
https://store.steampowered.com/app/723130/Railgunners/
Gamejolt page link
https://gamejolt.com/games/railgunners/291060
Links and Assets:
Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ib3ny2-XeAs&t
Contact
expgamestudios@gmail.com
https://twitter.com/expgamestudios
History
The Team
Former educational game devs, but tired of the unhealthy and boring workplace, we decided to start our own indie studio with close and trusted friends to make some cool games! Not everyone was able to fit on the double life of indie dev, intern workers and college students, but Canoi Gomes and Filipe brizolara pushed on, as programmer and artist respectively, we started participating on game jams, and later one of these jams turned into a project for a full game, and that game is “Railgunners”. We kept working on the game as well as we could until it was obvious we needed to expand the team to fill the areas we were lacking, it was when Daniel Dante joined us as the main composer and SFX artist.
Later Canoi decided to leave the team to finish university and follow other ventures and was replaced by Luiz Alves and Didigameboy from Heavy Sheep (Black Jack math, Super Chicken Jumper), both excellent programmers who helped elevate the level of the game’s code and bring us to the finishing line.
The Game
Built on gamemaker 2, Railgunners is the first commercial project started at Expresso Game Studios, though in the meanwhile we also released on steam Super Platformer Gun, Spooky Station and Nami (on early access).
Idealized during the Mini Ludum Dare #63, with the theme being fusion of two games, and we settled on a mix of shmup and runner, two genres we appreciate. Though the prototype was not ready in time for the jam, the idea had enough potential to be expanded on it’s on full game; and it was carefully being polished and transformed to what we have today, being tested in some of the biggest gaming events in brazil, like the Brazil Game Show, Firma Fest and others where the game was validated by the public and fellow devs multiple times.