Greetings, Captains! While the team is busy chewing through development, some of us, meaning the idiot writing this, have been killing time out of pure boredom. Work? Come on. Still, sometimes you have to peel your sweaty face off the couch and write some nonsense, like the little bit below. All hands on deck, or whatever.
What did you just watch? We’d love to answer that, if we’d actually watched it ourselves. Alright, alright, jokes aside. As you may have noticed, Canyons puts a fair bit of focus on big enemy rushes. It’s meant to be one of the main enemy systems in the game. Well, at least that’s the plan and that’s where we’re heading. We can’t promise we won’t suddenly decide the whole game should be about oil wrestling giant kaiju instead. Anyway, the crowds. Or, as the locals call them, the Horde. What are they, and what do you serve them with?
Bath salts, judging by the screenshot! Ha! Ba-dum-tss! Alright, fine, complicated joke. Florida will get it... Back to the Horde.
We already handed the keyboard to a programmer in one of the previous posts, and he typed up some nonsense about particles. Now it’s the game designer’s turn:
“Hordes in the Canyons are everyday trouble, not some rare event. The world is slowly waking up, and there are fewer and fewer places where you won’t find a crowd of mad Awakened waiting for you. Instinct pulls them together, closer to their own kind, and that turns into a problem.
Bigger and stronger Awakened are less affected by those instincts. Their minds are more developed, and the stronger an Awakened is, often the larger too, the more likely it is to wander around alone, scaring off its smaller kin. The Horde, on the other hand, is aggressive and dumb as a brick, which makes it a pretty awful neighbor.
Horde density adjusts dynamically based on how many players are in the team. That comes down to the game design and balance we’re trying to build. When you’re fighting a mass enemy, clean headshots don’t change much. There are simply too many heads. That’s where real teamwork and survival strategy begin. You’ll need to use every system on your Crawler, every weapon you have, your unique abilities, Blood Pacts, and the environment itself, just to make sure even a thousand deranged not-quite-zombies can’t break through your defenses. Doing all of that alone, all at once, is a lot harder than doing it with experienced comrades.
While one player holds back the push with a heavy machine gun mounted on the Crawler, two others are planting charges on a giant chunk of rock to cut off the enemy flow, and the fourth is supporting those crusader-sappers with the Pact of the Cross, healing them at the right moment and picking off enemies that get too close. Beautiful!”
Gary Designson, entirely fictional game designer on Canyons.
Big talk... Get it working first! Which is, by the way, exactly what everyone is busy with right now. Working on the Horde is a big milestone for the project. Once it’s in place, we can start tuning balance and a whole bunch of other gameplay bits properly. Because if the Horde doesn’t work as one solid, cool, not-bugged-to-hell, varied system, then what’s the point of having it at all? And why build mechanics around it, right? Right.
So, while we were messing around with this deranged mass of polygons, we got some pretty interesting test footage. Our Horde of 120 social media managers, marketers, tarot readers, and UFO experts decided we could put together a little video and remind our beloved players that we, too, are kind of Awakened. After all, we’re not dead yet. So we did.
That’s about it.
And while we work, with release still somewhere out there in the depths of the Canyons, you can always come throw rocks at us on our little social pages if you get bored. They’re all listed just below, and on the project’s main page too, probably. Too lazy to check. The couch is almost cold.
And, as usual, special mention goes to our Discord, where we talk about all our projects, and pretty much anything else too. It’s also where our liveliest and most active community hangs out:
Дискорд:
And the email is a fine old tradition, so we list that separately too. Almost every time. We do have one, yes:
And don’t forget to add Canyons to your wishlist five or six times a day! We’re almost certain it’s great for your ears and feet, and absolutely not habit-forming:
And then there’s Breathedge 2. We’ll have news on that little fellow very soon. Yes, yes, for those of you who care. And if you don’t care, feel free to add it to your wishlist anyway, so you don’t forget how much you don’t care.