TL;DR Xolo started as quick arcade fun inside Life's mini-spaces and grew into evolving, AI-generated battles like A.G.I. Joe vs Predator, where grinding unlocks tokens and top time shines using NFTs. Keep reading to see how it all unfolded in the AZTEQ One Platform.
Arcade halls are buzzing again with excitement, games like Terminator Salvation or Top Gun Maverick are massive hits, drawing crowds for their simple thrills, but they are held back by special hardware that limits everything to basic controls, same levels to speed run, and no real depth beyond chasing high scores on a single machine. You'd drop a quarter, blast cyborgs or jets, and chase that rush, but once the game's over, there was no saving progress or online rivalries — just local bragging rights until the next player reset it. But as tech evolves and mini-games become the go-to for quick hits in bigger worlds again like for browser titles or mobile apps, they tap into that instant dopamine fix, delivering short bursts of satisfaction through easy pick-up-and-play mechanics, evolving into drivers of the type of gaming where a few minutes of frantic action could hook you for hours, balancing accessibility against the growing demands of more complex, persistent experiences in shared virtual spaces.
The charm of Xolo lies in its ever-shifting setup, blending visuals like glowing enemy trails or explosive effects through smart rendering that adapts on the fly. Waves of enemies ramp up with AI-placed obstacles, while your character's boosts light up with shiny overlays, much like the layered glows we've seen in wetness or shore effects in Life. It's all about mixing base designs with dynamic flashes—colors popping for power-ups, textures rippling during chases—handled in passes where the core scene gets that extra sparkle under changing lights, making each run feel fresh and intense. Getting this to work on everything from desktops to phones throws in some curveballs, since not all devices handle the fancy graphics or quick changes the same way. High-end setups fly through it, but mobiles might hiccup on the evolving levels, so the system tones down details smartly while keeping the thrill alive. Xolo relies on the Tetra Web3D engine that relies on WebGPU, which steps in to smooth things out, though spotty browser support means it has to tweak on the go, avoiding slowdowns that could kill the arcade vibe.
At its core, Xolo builds on adaptive layers—like enemy patterns that get tougher or maps that shift—split between fixed rules for fairness and flexible bits that Onyx tweaks per session. Masks keep the chaos contained, stopping weird glitches like enemies popping through walls, so changes roll out clean without breaking the flow. Tiny sparks and hidden math make the magic happen, like bursts for defeated foes or ripples from your dodges, spun up by systems mimicking real motion. In Xolo games, these zip along on with Onyx, letting the game surprise you with ramping challenges, drawing from bigger patterns for those "just one more try" moments.
Good game development starts with the gameplay mechanics first. No matter how it looks, if it isn't fun to play you missed the key component what makes a videogame its own medium. Xolo games has a bunch of ingredients; the time crisis where you have to kill enemies and collect the items before the clock runs zero, limit movement into one direction and require the player to make smart decisions such as adding a step between shooting through aiming, using characters they know from mainstream so a strong backstory exists in their mind before starting the game and difficulty - one that is intelligent to adjust to the skill level of the player. This is exactly what we did with A.G.I. Joe; with Snake Eyes as your character and mixing in the godfather of enemies - the Predator. Having the player to collect "evidence", powerups and the mechanic to aim before firing shifting the camera position to shoulder level. Add a crazy soundtrack and you have a fun experience. But where is the added value of bragging rights if you are just playing a simple arcade game? So we implemented the X social media platform with X "intents" - complete a level and share your completion time and kills - and record it inside a Sui NFT. Web3 meets online arcade when ever, where ever.
The game map is where it all starts and Onyx makes this extremely easy to manage the maps that use seeds for procedural generation, but uses its intelligence to make it all sensible. The agents managed by Onyx make each enemy aware of the player, like a hyve mind that are all against you - the player. But the enemy that the player doesn't really see is the one in front of their eyes; the game level itself. Traps, obstacles and build as a tiny maze where they have to find their way out. There is no way back and you have to survive; and every iteration, this enemy evolves too.
During this stage, loading high quality models for the environment would be pre-optimization, which would add to the changes cycle to tweak and create the most favorable gameplay. The first issues we encountered were the placement of the action buttons (which were a bit to low to the bottom) and the aiming being difficult. Jumping and collider tweaks, enemies that got too eager or crawled backwards are some examples that were easy to fix; Onyx was capable to fix the codebase in a matter of minutes. More difficult was the limitations on iOS devices, where Safari allows the usage of WebGPU yet still sandboxes the amount of memory for a session, freezing the game or simply crashed out.
We found solutions and it would have been more difficult to pinpoint if we used high fidelity geometry first. But we got a lot of compliments for the smoothness of the animation system and the speed the games load up without installing any application - and once the obvious bugs were out, the competitive nature of our community testers took over the Telegram channel. Legends were born that day, where 300 second levels were completed in unbelievable time records of 26 seconds. Player versus Machine. Adding different weapon types, switching from left to right handed, added 1st person views and having keyboard bindings (instead of hardcoded QWERTY) and smoother analog controls on mobile became the next mission for Xolo. Using pre-rendered backgrounds, imposters to support the limited abilities of the GPU on mobile really made the experience come together to nearly AAA quality. Especially using the wet effect that we recently added in Life, did magic on the vegetation in Xolo. The jungle is coming alive when you play and the doppler effect of the genuine predator sounds make it feel you are part of the danger of becoming the hunted.
Eventually, we are happy with the state of what we call high fidelity as we are even amazed ourselves how good a Xolo game can look with the ever evolving capabilities of the Web3D engine Tetra. The wet effect and improved lighting system make the jungle of A.G.I. Joe vs Predator almost like playing a native game and the Predator enemies really look scary as the lighting scatters of their armor and their eyes glow up. Xolo games are a part of the Metaverse as a single player experience that makes your heroic efforts known to the world instead of a local game screen in your game cafe.