http://secretponchos.com/game-info
Secret Ponchos takes place in a dramatic Wild West setting, full of tension, stylization and attitude reflective of a graphic-novel. In a town crawling with bandits, murderers and bounty hunters you are an outlaw with a bounty on your head and everyone is gunning for you. In order to survive you must be the best and to gain notoriety you must defeat your opponents–claiming their achievements as your own. How many you kill and the rewards you collect define your legacy.
Secret Ponchos is an online combat game. Players battle against each other for notoriety and reputation. These duels are recorded into your character’s legacy. Players can compete in one-vs-one duels, engage in western style gang fights, or enter the fray with the Free-For-All mode. Upon entering the game, players create and customize their own outlaw(s) which can then be upgraded (both abilities and appearance) as they gain reputation points.
The game-play aggressively crosses genre boundaries, creating a distinctive and innovative feel. It brings together the strategic elements of overhead camera games, the team dynamics & matchmaking systems of 1st person shooters and the responsiveness of a fighting game.
http://www.xblafans.com/pax-east-secret ... 67736.html
Anybody can take their pick from a massive variety of first and third-person competitive shooters, but Secret Ponchos is completely different with its top-down perspective and radial aiming. Recalling the development process in concept, Mapara remembered, “As soon as we moved the camera overhead, all the mechanics changed. There’s no textbook, there’s no precedent to copy, so we had to invent new mechanics, which is really neat. It’s sort of playing more like a fighting game. In a third-person and first-person shooter, the gameplay really is about two things: you have to know where to look, and then you have to have good ability to position your crosshairs and shoot, right?
“But this isn’t about knowing where to look. You don’t have to touch a camera at all. You see all the pieces, but it’s about jumping out of the way, jumping in range, taking a couple shots, jumping out of range. Seeing somebody bust out their knife and you kind of get the hell away from them, try stun them so they move slower so they don’t get you, you know? I think that especially is the thing that was introduced is the idea of spacing, because you’re balancing precision-based on I can shoot eight meters, but that guy is 10 meters away. You can see exactly, I’m gonna roll in, take a couple shots and roll out.”
We watched players patrol a dry graveyard, taking cover behind the tombstones before jumping out to pop some shots. Each character clearly used a different weapon and had different running, dodging, aiming and shooting abilities. Wherever they aimed, a shadow-like reticle would point the direction and the reach of the weapon. For most characters, the range is quite short, requiring players to dance around the 8-meter kill distance to pop in a shot without getting shot themselves.
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3v7rlxdLkQ
