Mapping RESOGUN's gameplay to a cylinder eliminated the need for a minimap, as the player can always see around the bend and plan ahead. When having a horizontal looping playfield in a purely 2D environment, some kind of minimap is essential to communicate the extended surroundings to the player. We adopted the human-saving mechanic from our very early prototypes, and the humans ended up largely defining RESOGUN's identity.Īnother thing we knew early on was that RESOGUN's gameplay would take place on a cylinder. Much like Defender and Datastorm (two of our key inspirations), introducing this extra gameplay layer of saving the humans created an interesting tension for the player, as they needed to balance their "shoot and survive" abilities with a clear secondary goal.
"Depth without complexity" was a mantra we followed allow the main game to be simple to pick up and play, but create some layers of depth for those looking for that extra challenge.Īdding some humans for the player to save worked well with this approach. Our goal was to achieve that "one more go" feeling, and create a game that's easy to pick up and hard to master. We've been largely inspired by classic arcade games, and we wanted to do our part in keeping that arcade spirit alive. We eventually shifted away from this and went for a darker tone.įor the gameplay, we knew from the start that we wanted a horizontal, fast-paced, skill-based shoot 'em up. The first level we prototyped had a huge tree in the background, and the humans were in small huts.
Initially we were planning on having brighter colors, blue skies, and a more naturalistic tone, to represent environments that we thought would be the human habitats. Preliminary concept art for an early version of the game.Īesthetically, we started out on a somewhat lighter note. Since both games shared a similar design approach (being shoot 'em ups mapped onto a 3D surface), we were able to utilize many of the existing sub-systems and start working on the base version of RESOGUN immediately. We started implementing the game using the Super Stardust Delta engine. In the context of our early development, this meant that RESOGUN was initially targeting PS Vita hardware, and all the technical possibilities and limitations that came with that. When considering possible multi-platform development though, the weakest platform always becomes the lead.
Resogun developer ps3#
At the time we had PS3 and PS Vita dev-kits in house, so we used those as a reference for potential platforms. In the beginning we were fairly platform-agnostic. I remember when Harri Tikkanen, our creative director, first showed the video to me being a huge shoot 'em up fan I instantly recognized this as my dream project, and I insisted I'd work on the game if we went ahead with it. The pre-production process was rather simple: Before we started development we made a concept video of the game, featuring a rough estimate of what the visuals and gameplay would be like. The "RESO-" prefix touches upon the concept of high " RESOlution", and the "-GUN" postfix was added since - being a shoot 'em up - we predicted you'd occasionally be shooting things. The name " RESOGUN" was coined by Petteri "Petsku" Putkonen, one of our guys at the time. We quickly came up with a few concepts to utilize this aesthetic approach: one of them was a shoot 'em up, another morphed into an unreleased mobile game, and a few more never made it out of concept phase. During the time of RESOGUN's inception, we were considering ideas for our next big game and voxels seemed like a natural way to express this "neo-retro" design philosophy. At Housemarque, we've been making arcade-style games for a while now by marrying timeless gameplay values with cutting-edge tech.
Voxels are essentially 3D pixels, and are quite literally the building blocks of the RESOGUN universe. The core team was 12 members strong, with frequent support from our R&D and art departments, so in total about 20 people total worked on the original version of the game. RESOGUN was in development for a total of about 20 months or so, with an additional 12 months added to develop the two expansions for the game: Heroes and Defenders.
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