Spire

[BigJKO]

Holy cow! Hitbox Team, the peeps behind Dustforce have announced their next game, a randomly generated tower FPS thingy of doom? It looks amazing. Like a first-person Wind Waker! And sounds like they're going for a similarly skill-based gameplay as Dustforce. This is a game I'm looking very much forward to, now..

http://hitboxteam.com/mystery-and-mastery

[Cleinhun]

I really liked Dustforce, but that was almost entirely due to the visuals and music. The gameplay was fine, good even, but at the end of the day it was still just a platformer. This however, looks quite interesting. The item combos and the procedural generation remind me a bit of Binding of Isaac. The first-person platforming is something that seems hard to do well, but the movement mechanics in Dustforce were satisfying, so these guys probably know what they're doing. Really curious to see more of this one.

[Nachimir]

I'm interested. The way they talk about Quake make me a little nervous, because it reminds me a lot of the interviews done to hype Unreal Tournament 2003 (Basically: "It's going to be amazing because we're designing it with focus groups of eSports FPS players!". Cue rerelease a year later as UT2004, mostly to make it feel less clunky). Then again, this is a small indie studio: They wouldn't do that, and I think stand a higher chance of making a coherent, interesting design.

I like that they evidently understand how procedural generation can make stuff bland, and are working against that.

[Sno]

Definitely a massive Wind Waker vibe from those shots, looks gorgeous.

(Basically: "It's going to be amazing because we're designing it with focus groups of eSports FPS players!". Cue rerelease a year later as UT2004, mostly to make it feel less clunky)

Ok, going off topic here, but hold on a second, are you sure about that? I played both a significant amount, and I don't recall UT2k3 and UT2k4 feeling any different from eachother. I remember the issue more being that UT2k3 was missing a lot of fan favorite gametypes and lacking anything particularly new in their place. The main things UT2k4 did was bring back assault, add onslaught, and cram in a ton more maps for everything else.

[TychoCelchuuu]

This is also a good time to jump into the "Quake vs. Unreal" debate and point out that compared to Quake, Unreal has always felt clunky

[Nachimir]

Let's not

Ok, going off topic here, but hold on a second, are you sure about that? I played both a significant amount, and I don't recall UT2k3 and UT2k4 feeling any different from eachother. I remember the issue more being that UT2k3 was missing a lot of fan favorite gametypes and lacking anything particularly new in their place. The main things UT2k4 did was bring back assault, add onslaught, and cram in a ton more maps for everything else.

Yes, I'm sure. I was very much a part of the mapping community at the time, and response to 2K3 was lackluster. At the time 2K4 was approaching, there was some "It's like a sports franchise, maybe we'll do a yearly release like Madden" talk from Epic too, but I'm almost certain it was tweaked to feel a little more like UT99, and a lot of fans of the series were pretty relieved by that. At the time, Epic were exceptionally good at maintaining contact with their community of players, mapmakers and modders; even those high up in the company would regularly respond to email from fans. I played both 2K4 and 99 at a LAN party the other week, and IMO 99 has held up much better over time (The heightmaps that were new in that version of the engine led to some big, wide open outdoor deathmatch maps, which don't work well with that design).

Anyway, it's easy for developers to talk big about their new upcoming FPS, and Epic have definitely had their peaks and troughs with UT. I really hope Spire lives up to what the developers are aiming for, and I'm pleased to see indies tackling genres that previously only seemed open to big studios.

[Sno]

This is also a good time to jump into the "Quake vs. Unreal" debate and point out that compared to Quake, Unreal has always felt clunky

Freeze frame high five!

[Roswell47]

From the RPS article their inspiration was the movement physics for the Q3 mod CPMA which makes me STOKED!

[I_smell]

I wasn't interested until I pieced together that the developers of Dust Force are making a "skill based FPS of mystery and mastery".

That's gotta be something super cool, right? I don't know what the hell CPMA is, but "based on a movement physics mod" sounds perfectly right to me!

[Roswell47]

I wasn't interested until I pieced together that the developers of Dust Force are making a "skill based FPS of mystery and mastery".

That's gotta be something super cool, right? I don't know what the hell CPMA is, but "based on a movement physics mod" sounds perfectly right to me!

You don't know what CPMA is? Well, you're in for a treat:

[Sno]

It helps to know what strafe jumping is, namely that it's a movement bug in Q3A that allows you to accelerate ridiculously while stringing together jumps with just the right movement.

Like rocket jumping, it's another Quake bug that was just kind of welcomed into the canon.

[eot]

I could go on forever about the movement mechanics in Q3, they're really something else. Because a lot of them are bugs they're so different from anything that a designer would intentionally make and yet they have almost all the qualities you look for in a movement based game. They're extremely nuanced which allows players to be expressive and they have an almost limitless skill ceiling. Even just strafing in a straight line has a skill progression as large as going from the easiest level in Super Meat Boy to the hardest one (I'm serious). It's so fascinating to me that such a great game mechanic follows from how Carmack decided to do some vector addition code.

Here's a movie showing off some advanced techniques:

For example, at 0:50 he does an overbounce (one of several types) which allows you to redirect your vertical velocity, usually forwards. At 1:28 he does a teleporter jump, intentionally falling into the teleport trigger. When coming out of the teleporter you're pushed which disables ground friction for something like 200ms allowing you to accelerate a lot (

). 6:24 is another telejump, but this time jumping into the teleporter and then jumping immediately again, resulting in a doublejump that gives twice the height. At 10:41 & 10:54 you see a gazboost which involves falling towards the ground and shooting a plasma shot beneath you right before you land. The knockback from the plasma has the same effect as the teleporter, removing friction for a fraction of a second, but it's very hard to time right. Too early and you will spend too many frames falling to take advantage of it, too late and you're knocked off the ground.

[Niyeaux]

Wind Waker graphics, CPMA movement, music by Lifeformed (the guy who did the fantastic Dustforce soundtrack), and procedurally generated FPS levels. What's not to like? As soon as I saw the announcement, this game became one of my most anticipated future releases. It looks like Hitbox is setting themselves up to have a seriously impressive - and diverse - catalog of finished projects.