After a long day of making the world’s most polarizing space MMO not feel so small most people would like to go home, unwind, watch some TV, maybe have drink, but not Ryan Junkett. So what does Destiny‘s Lead Sandbox Engineer do in his spare time? According to his post on the PlayStation Blog, he codes. More specifically he codes Inversus, a cool new shooter and Junkett’s passion project.
This is my nights and weekends indie passion project. During the days I work on bigger games with bigger teams.
As Ryan puts it, the game started off as nothing, “no licensed engine, no sound effect library, and no texture package. It all started with an empty source code file.” The only thing he couldn’t do was compose music, so he enlisted the help of indie artist Lyvo. From there the game grew into a simple shooter filled with hidden complexity.
To paraphrase Ryan’s elevator pitch, Inversus is an arcade style 1v1/2v2 shooter strategy’em-up. Players control blocks of the opposite color and attempt to shoot each other. The twist is every shot changes the color of the tiles on the map the shot passes over. This mechanic limits player movement: white can move on black, black can move on white. The strategy comes from skillfully trapping and shooting your enemy.
Not into multiplayer? Inversus has you covered. The game also features a arcade mode and it too follows the same “simple mechanics with layered complexity” theme as the rest of the game.
traditional rule set: shoot enemies for points, build up a multiplier, don’t run out of lives, brag about your spot on the leaderboard.
It’s from there that the game will challenge the player. From what Junkett said in the post, the AI adapts to how the you are playing. Do you like the game’s charge attack? Then the enemies love it too. Have a habit of not dying; then bigger enemies spawn to try and change that. By changing how the enemies react to the player, it is insured that each new game will be a dynamic experience.
While there is no concrete release date for Inversus it is slated for spring of this year for PS4 and PC. In the mean time why not read about Junkett’s other little side project Destiny 2.