We are developing a 3D platformer with detailed physics

Introduction

We are developing game about movement. The main feature is the inertia of the character. The game features detailed motion physics, which will often cause you to suffer and fall into the abyss at first. Your goal is to learn how to use the game physics to your advantage – speedrun levels and get into seemingly inaccessible places.

Game description

In the demo version you will go through levels. Your goal is to collect a certain number of crystals and get to the target.

The main movement tools in our game are the hook and the dash. Both of these mechanics are common in games with fast-paced gameplay, so what's special? The fact is that each developer implements these mechanics in his own way, depending on his vision. And our vision is that other people’s hooks and jerks are crap!

Just a joke, of course. In no way do I want to say anything bad about such excellent games as Ghostrunner, Neon White and Ultrakill, which also use the grappling hook and dash. My problem is that these games not only about movement, and certainly not about physics. These games have many other mechanics that draw attention away from movement and, as a result, movement is cut down to suit the needs of the core gameplay.

The hook is especially painful – in the above games it is very simplified. The hook can be compared to portals: often the mechanics of portals are also simplified. At the same time, we have the Portal duology, the gameplay of which is built around portals. Would Portal be as interesting if portals could be placed not on the surface, but on a strictly defined minimum set of points? Or if the portal did not retain the inertia of objects falling into it? I don't think so.

In our game, the hook can be attached to any point of the “hooked” objects, and the hook itself retains and transmits the player’s inertia in accordance with physics. We have tried many implementations of the hook, and now it is perhaps the most complete part of the demo.

With a dash, everything is somewhat simpler – usually in shooters and action games the character does not have high inertia. This is understandable; in such games, a character with high inertia would simply be inconvenient to control. In our game, inertia is the basis, so the thing about the dash is that the player can save the acceleration from the dash and use the grappling hook to redirect it, which is the main aspect of the gameplay.

Game idea

The unofficial slogan of our game is everything that seems natural to the player should be possible. And we are moving right in this direction! There are no “forbidden” zones or invisible walls in the game. If during testing we noticed that the tester wanted to somehow deceive our expectations – for example, instead of following the obvious route, he was perverted and somehow skipped part of the level, we made a feature out of it. The levels for the demo were created using this principle.

You can help develop the game!

Those who have already followed the link can see that the game is not finished: there is no sound, and the graphics are assembled from free assets (which, I hope, is not too noticeable). If the game is so unfinished, why publish it?

The fact is that now we really need the opinion of a wide audience. We made the base of the game, and in order to create a full-fledged indie game from this tech demo, we need an outside perspective. Tell us what in the demo version bothers you or causes you inconvenience. You may not be able to do something in our game that seems to you natural – moments like these are especially important to us! You can write all this in survey.