Hitbox Team goes in a cool new direction
It’s so good to know that Dustforce was successful enough for Hitbox Team to make another game, one that’s a significant departure from what you might have expected the studio to tackle next. In a blog post, Hitbox has revealed details on Spire, “an FPS about ascending a monolithic tower of unknown origin” focused on procedural generation of rooms and high-speed player movement.
It sounds like they have got some neat design ideas floating around in their heads. While I recommend reading about the title directly from Hitbox, a few elements stood out to me. “Environments and the transitions between them tell a story. In Spire, we want to keep this in mind in order to create a procedural level generation that has flow and character. If the generator has created a dangerous, frantic sequence with lots of combat, it might think to then generate a scene with lower intensity to better control the emotional arc of the experience.”
Further down: “Players will also have access to an unusual variety of items in the game. A huge part of the mastery will be figuring out novel combinations of the left-hand and right-hand items to overcome different challenges. Some items will be movement focused, some will change the environment, and some will be for protecting or healing yourself. We want to make Spire a game where it’s fun to watch extremely skilled players as they sprint around dashing off walls while switching items and combining their effects in clever ways.”
As much as it goes without saying, I have to say it anyway: wow, that art style! Based on what’s been shown so far, I’m excited to see them step away from 2D game development, even if they are skilled at it. Conceptually, there are some interesting ideas that we don’t frequently see in first-person titles, and that’s something I can really get behind.
