In-depth couch gaming!

Hi folks!
We are releasing Pix the Cat on PS4™ and PSVita™ (cross-buy) in the first weeks of October and we have a new game mode exclusive for PS4™ players: the ARENA !!!

Call me old-school but the most outrageous fun I have when playing games is with friends, at home, facing the same screen, hearing laughter or frustration after a quirky situation. I grew up with Bomberman and am still playing Towerfall just to enjoy shoving my buddy’s controller away when he’s winning or whining too much!

We have been wanting to make a nervous and rewarding couch-game for years at Pastagames and Pix the Cat turned out to be the best opportunity to satisfy this multiplayer urge!

In the ARCADE Mode, you control a restless cat in a dimensional maze. You collect ducklings that line up in a tail behind you – and then deliver them on targets to open the gates of the next level.

The core Pix gameplay sets solid grounds for a feisty ARENA brawl! So we added three other cats to make a party of (up to) four players that fight to be the last PixBot standing.

You will collect ammo-eggs that make your tail longer (and slow you down) and then use them to destroy your opponents. Three egg-types grant you different weapons: the white stun-shots, the green proxy-mines and the purple amok-rockets.

You can also choose to consume your ammo-eggs for a continuous “Dash” to ram through your opponents. Dashing is colorblind and will burn through purple, green and white ammo-eggs alike.

Find your own style to go with each of the seven Arenas – they cater to all! From Trap-Tsar to Lean Mean Missile Launching Machine, through the Insta-Head-First-Rusher without forgetting the Unstoppable Dash Train, every strategy has its place… and its score screen medal!

Don’t underestimate the power of white eggs and minimalistic strategy. Collecting a lot of ammo is not always wise. A carefully timed stun shot followed up with a tiny-one-egg-dash can be extremely effective!

Some of the Arenas feature nested sub-levels you can hide in to avoid oncomers. Or use them to change battle-grounds if you think it is to your advantage. The warps can be your saving grace! But watch out, as soon as all PixBots are in the same dimension, the camera will zoom down, closing warps on its way!

If you’re having a three or four player ARENA party, killed PixBots will come back to life as ghosts! This way, you never stop playing… because if a ghost hits a live PixBot, they’ll switch, one coming back to life as the other fades away into a grudgeful ghost!

Ghosts may not be speedy but they pack a punch! If you or your ammo-tail gets caught you’ll regret it! Don’t try shooting them either, you might be in for an unpleasant surprise!

There’s too much to say on the many strategies and tricks to adopt in order to win with the various setups and settings you go about in the ARENA… So you’ll have to find your own! Please do share them if you’ve invented new ones!

It’s the first time at Pastagames that we stay afterhours and fight for a controller to play a game we’ve being working on for ages! We hope you’ll take as much pleasure blasting your friends away as we did in making this mode!

tl;dr

Pix the Cat – ARENA is a local multiplayer combat game mode. It’s friendly and beastly, hectic and strategic. It’s very simple to tame and have fun with, even when playing with experienced players but if you stick with it you’ll find many levels of hidden depths - pun intended - waiting to be explored.
So dash on fellow PixBots!

Find us @pastagames and @nadimpasta

The post Pix the Cat – ARENA MODE appeared first on Pastagames.

“Today at Gamescom 2014, SONY and PASTAGAMES officially announce that PIX the CAT is coming to PS4 and PSVita in FALL 2014 with a mission: to make your thumbs sore! After Pix’n Love – Rush (PS Minis), the infamous blue cat is back for an intense scoring arcade game loaded with surprises!”

Writing these words means the world to us. It means that the game we’ve been making for the last three years is coming out!

Our strategy at Pastagames is simple: gather XP and gold by making cool games for others (Rayman Jungle Run, Panzer Bimbo, AR Rescue…) then spend it all on our homegrown production. We empty the bank account and start the cycle over…

PIX the CAT is the game that saw the most cycles. For the first time in years, we’re playing it solo! No publishing or editing to hold us back from our many kinks and obsessions! Naturally, we’ve ended up being obsessed and kinky about everything, even the new Pastagames website! But most of all about getting players sucked into the game from head to toe!

The Arcade gameplay comes from our initial desire to build a hectic 2D level-based scoring game that offers constant flow without any kind of scrolling. We wanted the BLUE CAT to ride the maze and save ducklings from levels displayed on different dimensions. As PIX extends his tail, he’ll straddle over multiple dimensions at the same time! We went for a game of Combo, Boosts, Perfects and FEVER TIME!

We now have powerful enough tools to display infinitely small details. So we tackled the technical challenge of showing the levels within the levels – Russian Dolls style! Our goal was to build a game where your sensations grow and intensify as your skill improves. A flexible gameplay where speed and tempo adapt to each player.

This is where the On & Off production schedule turned out handy. We quickly needed to get the game into as many hands as possible to collect feedback while working on other projects. We had to take a very close look at players improving. So we took advantage of the Off periods to have a custom arcade cabinet built for PIX the CAT. Its purpose and destiny were fulfilled in bars, hands-on parties at our studio and game-conventions over the last two years.

The cabinet turned out to be the best thing we have bought. Ever. Watching some of you play regularly and others only for a few games was an amazing tool to build and polish our gameplay throughout production. Once the backbone of the game was ready, we’ve packed PIX the CAT with surprises! Things to lower your heart-rate in between Arcade thrills. Things to make you raise your eyebrows. Things to make you raise one eyebrow…

The one surprise we can tell you about right now is: “The ARENA! Up to 4 players send their PIXBOT into battle knowing it will probably not come back! Come have a go at this PS4 exclusive local multiplayer battle ARENA!”

It’s a blast releasing a game for Sony platforms because the machines are well designed, the controllers very precise and the people we work with at SCE sure know how to make our lives easier! It was a very natural transition from the arcade sticks to the PS4 and PSVita controllers and the display abilities of both consoles shine the best light on our handmade PIX the CAT.

Come one. Come all. The Grid of Infinity awaits…

ps: You cannot buy Happiness but you can cross-buy PIX the CAT, and that is almost the same.

The post Gamescom 2014: PIX the CAT on PS4 and PSVITA! appeared first on Pastagames.