14 DAY TRIAL // Hitbox Team, the developer behind the rather impressive Dustforce, has just revealed its upcoming project – Spire. The game is a first-person shooter that features procedurally generated levels that will require not just brawn but also brains, according to the indie studio.
Dustforce impressed through its sharp visuals, its great soundtrack, and the easy-to-comprehend yet tough-to-master gameplay.
Now, Hitbox Team is working on a brand new project called Spire, which tasks players with ascending a monolithic tower whose internal structure changes all the time.
The game's different levels are procedurally generated but this doesn't mean that you'll get a myriad of environments that don't exactly fit together, as Hitbox says that its generation system knows how to keep the flow of the game going.
"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," the developer wrote on its website.
"In this way, Spire will generate intentional level flow instead of randomized environments. The resolution of the generation is very high: there are no premade rooms or scripted events. Everything from the placement of the books on a shelf to the shape of the walls and floors will be generated with intention."
Players will be tasked with defeating all sorts of fantasy creatures while using different types of items not just to kill them but also to solve puzzles in order to advance through the tower.
Hitbox will keep gamers coming back to Spire by organizing different leaderboards and challenges each week in order to increase the competition between players.
"Players can generate random spires with a seed input, or compete on leaderboards for mastery of a 'weekly spire'. We want the offline mode of the game to serve as the non-competitive mode, or as practice for the ranked challenge, while the ranked mode will be a hotly contested battle for the top-scoring slots," the developer added.
"As well as a standard mode, there will also be 'burdens' that a player can take on at the beginning of a run to make their challenge even more difficult. Each burden will have a separate leaderboard (or be playable offline), so that in a week it's possible for everyone to compete on the same tower in a variety of categories."
You can expect to hear more about Spire, which is coming to the PC, Mac, and Linux platforms, later this year.