Vortex Attack

Title: Vortex Attack
Genre: Arcade Action Shoot’em up
Steam release date: May 27th, 2015 (heavily updated : July 2016)

Very positive reviews

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Vortex Attack is a frenetic arcade space shooter featuring explosive effects, an intense local multiplayer mode and online tournaments via Steam.

The alien war machines caught us by surprise. A strange energy vortex appeared near colony Vehar-12, then they came, swarming from the centre of the vortex.

The first attack was just over 20 Eartho-days ago and already eighteen colonies have been lost. 56 million souls, gone.
Now they’re approaching Earthos, our biggest colony. We’re fighting back, but if it falls, we will be all destroyed. The vortices had seemed all but indestructible.

But now we have hope. Our technicians patched together a captured war machine, and discovered the key to the vortices, a new kind of energy they’ve dubbed ‘Lumergy’.

Our first tests of the device lead to an unexpected discovery. The energy used to create a vortex could also be used to destroy one.

Using our modified war machine we can collect the Lumergy, and reverse its energy to collapse a vortex, destroying the swarm within.

We can predict where the next vortex will open, and we can destroy it.

We have only one chance at this, only one ship.
Your only mission: Destroy the vortices. Save all of us.

Game mechanics

The goal of each level is to close the vortices. Although some vortices will take several stages to close. Upon reaching a level where the vortex can be totally closed, it will unleash the most dangerous of its swarms to make things a lot harder for our players. The twist we’ve added in this game is that the vortex on each level will keep growing, throwing ever increasing waves of enemies to overwhelm the player, so that they must continually fight to push the vortex back. The game has been especially designed to play with up to 3 friends, although we’re considering adding an optional fourth player based on player feedback.

To implode the vortices, the player must destroy enemies to collect their energy. On top of the vortex there are two spheres: The player level (blue sphere) and the vortex level (red sphere). When the energy item sent by the player reaches the vortex, the blue sphere shrinks the black hole, symbolized with the red sphere. But in the other hand the black hole is constantly growing stretching the blue sphere. The game ends when the blue sphere makes the red one disappear or the red one grows to its maximum size. The concept is kind of new, reuses the concept based in Beekyr and improves it by removing the unnecessary bits.

The idea

After their first game Beekyr, Kaleidogames wanted to experiment with a more abstract space theme, whilst building on the successful gameplay of Beekyr. This resulted in the initial prototype for Vortex Attack, which they put in front of players at several game festivals. Even in this rough state, players were immediately captured by the game, with people playing all day long at each festival. Following that success, Kaleidogames decided to make it into a full game, including a local multiplayer mode that combines the best elements of competition and collaboration.

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