It's time to claim your rightful place as the champion of the Gravitronix arena but get ready to deal with up to seven other players who are all shooting for the same title.
Vanquish your opponents with four different projectiles and the powerful beams of your gravity platform. Intercept attacks and take careful aim at exposed vulnerabilities. Deflect incoming projectiles or capture and charge them with energy for devastating explosive attacks. Team up with a friend and battle through campaign mode or recruit up to eight players on a single Wii system in versus mode for an all-out battle. Customize your matches with a variety of different options, such as flooding the arena with projectiles or making the game insanely fast. No matter how you like to play, grab your friends and have a blast.
Gravitronix is an action/battle game for 1-8 players on a single screen and uses different primitive shapes (cubes, pyramids, spheres, lines) as projectiles and utilizes unique physics per object.
The game involves defending territory on screen while simultaneously attempting to assault the territories of the up to 7 other players by using the aforementioned projectiles. The game features 8 player simultaneous play with four players holding a Wii Remote and four holding the attached Nunchuk.
The game revolves around twisting either a Wii Remote or Nunchuk and pressing two buttons. The player will twist to move a gravity platform back and forth within a set territory and use the two buttons (A and B or C and Z) to fire one of two gravity beams which will either capture projectiles or launch them away. The goal is to break through the other players’ defenses and send a projectile into their territory to defeat them.
Development for Gravitronix started in late 2007 after it was suggested by Nintendo that we start with something a little smaller for our first game. At the time Medaverse Studio was only a team of three people (Jesse, Robin and Mike). By the end of production, we had grown to seven and had contracted out the development of our music and sound effects.
One of our main goals in developing Gravitronix was to keep the game size as small as possible, at the time of development downloadable games were limited to the built-in storage on the Nintendo Wii and we did not have access to the SD card. Since we were aiming to keep the game small, we made the choice to write our own game engine, this caused us to have to push our original release date out almost a whole year.
Originally planned (and created) were 8 fully animated characters and each with their own dialog. Due to the goal of limited space to work with all animations were removed, the dialog selection was cut by over half and the still images used in the game were downgraded to use as few colors as possible.
Shortly before the release of Gravitronix, Nintendo was releasing Wii System Update 4.0, which would unlock the SD card for developers so we could now save and run games directly off a SD card, making our whole goal of small file size mute. This cause great regret in the office for pursuing this goal and we were sadly at a point where we could not delay the game to added everything back in. Gravitronix had been approved by the ESRB and had a release date from Nintendo.
Gravitronix was released to mix reviews, mostly in the middle of the road. We received criticism for the low-quality graphics (which we expected) and for some the controls were confusing, some did not understand that you only needed to twist the controller to make the paddle move and not swing your whole arm. While the reviews were not great, we did get an out poor of support from critics who looked forward to seeing what would come out from us next.
Plans for a Demo of Gravitronix along with an updated 2.0 version, which would have seen updated graphics, including the return of character animations, and Online play which was part of the original plan for Gravitronix, but would have caused release of the game to be delayed even further were all scrapped when the game fell short of hitting the 10,000 sales mark (We were under 500 short) which was required by Nintendo in order to see any revenue from the game sales.
All Versus Options and Level Select
At the options menu, press “12221” on player 1’s wiimote to access the level select and all versus mode options.
