Virus X is a local PC multiplayer game with up to four players. You take control over one of multiple virus types and try to capture all cells.
Each virus type you can play has a unique style. Additionally there are items which help you to control the game. You can place a safe zone to protect yourself or harm your opponent. You can wipeout nearly all viruses in one stroke or you can mutate the player's possessions. But be wary of the antibodies which will kill your viruses.
The concept is simple and easy to learn but it is hard to master the full control of the massive amount of viruses you can produce. Face the challenge and develop own strategies to defeat your foes.
- Graphics Card with Shader Model 3.0 and a minimum screen resolution of 1024*768
- Keyboard, recommend XBox gamepads
The Game Jam: Virus X is a follow-up project of Particle Storm Control which was developed during the Global Game Jam 2012 in Magdeburg. While Particle Storm Control implemented already most of todays game mechanics, it was limited to two players, a single mode, less balanced and without a specific theme (unless you call PARTILCES! a theme ;-))
Deluxe Extended: More than half a year later a modified version "Particle Storm Control Deluxe Extended Edition" hit the local student game developer community. Due to its continued popularity, a new team was formed to create Virus X.
Virus X: The work on what we tody know as Virus X started roughly in February 2013 and ended in July 2013 after discouraging rejection from two competitions and failure to find monetization possibilities.
The long Sleep: The game was then given in the hands of Enrico's company Silver Seed Games but apart from a few bug fixes and a few presentations, the company also was never able to publish it for various reasons. Meanwhile the game was still popular at various booths of the student game developer club Acagamics (all developers were highly engaged members).
Final Resurrection:
In July 2016, after showing the game at a gamedev meetup in an Irish pub, I felt a faint breath of nostalgia and decided to give the game back to the student community that once cradled it.
Virus X suffered from its technical background of using XNA4, a now deprecated game framework. Using it implied that the game was rather hard to maintain and required the user to install dependencies.
Previous ports to the still actively developed XNA implementation MonoGame failed, but it has come a long way since then which made a port feasible.
The old team members quickly agreed on the new plans and at last the port succeeded, which allows us to present this final version both as standalone Desktop version and as Windows 10 store.
Andreas Reich, 22 July 2016