PSBlog Feed: Pix the Cat: PS4 Exclusive Arena Mode Detailed

[Commander Fury]

Hi folks, my name is Nadim and I do game design at Pastagames. We are launching Pix the Cat on PS4 and PS Vita (with cross buy support) in early 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’ve been wanting to make a nervy, rewarding couch-multiplayer 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 battlegrounds 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 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 after hours and fight for a controller to play a game we’ve been working on for ages. We hope you’ll take as much pleasure blasting your friends away as we did in making this mode!

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!

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