Meet Your Maker: Designing Destruction in Behaviour Interactive’s New Building-and-Raiding Game
Behaviour Interactive’s Meet Your MakerA new building-and-riding game for first-person, set in post-apocalyptic dark future. The Custodian is the servant of the Chimera, a dying planet. Players take the Custodian’s role as an experiment to save Earth.
To help the Chimera evolve, you’ll need to provide it with pure genetic material, the world’s most precious remaining resource. But as you may have guessed, it won’t be easy to come by.
As players attempt to either steal or protect their genetic material, gameplay centers around infiltration and creation of Outposts. Each Outpost has been created by and for players. This makes user-generated content the main driving force behind the game.
Considering the Outposts you’ll be building are massive maze-like structures teeming with deadly traps and guards, the possibilities are nearly endless.
Mind Games
In Building Meet Your MakerPuts emphasis on block-based, strategic design. An Outpost’s heart is its extractor cube. This fills canisters full of the valuable genetic material. To protect it, players will draw from a customizable toolbox of traps and guards as they create environments to lure, outwit, and eviscerate other players attempting to take what’s theirs.
“When it comes to building a successful Outpost, I would say that psychology is very important,” shares Meet Your Maker’s Senior Game Designer Inouk Samson. “You need to think strategically and put yourself in the mind of a raider, try to understand how they’ll act in various situations, and plan accordingly.”
“Good trap and guard combos are very important because a single trap or guard will rarely be efficient. You have hundreds of combinations to choose from, even without considering block placement. How you put them together makes all the difference.”
Strategic Customization
What does a great trap combination look like? You can find a variety of traps. These include Corrosive Cubes that are filled with acid as well as Bomb Ejectors and Incinerators. To ensure maximum death for your devilish designs, each trap can be modified in numerous ways.
Bombs may become noisy. You can increase detection ranges. You can program traps to explode themselves. Each guard type can have its own patrol route that is drawn by the builder.
“I like to take the raider by surprise, which is why I like the Holocube,” explains Inouk. “It allows you to hide traps in plain sight. Corrosive cube is the next, because projectiles are able to pass through this while it looks solid. Killing raiders in an area they were convinced was safe is truly satisfying.”
“I’m a fan of mid-sized rooms as I love using the Bomb Ejector,” shares Meet Your Maker’s Creative Director Ash Pannell. “This trap drops bombs that bounce all over the place. The range trap is used to capture the raider near the door and to force him to use his grapple hook in order to fly through the space. This inevitably triggers the Bomb Ejector I’ve hidden in the ceiling, and boom!”
Blueprints
Building an Outpost is the best thing about it Meet Your MakerThis is your chance to create something completely unique.
“My approach is always to start by creating a space I can play in,” shares Ash. “This could be a cave, a tower, or something more fantastic like a temple. You want to create a nice flow through your space to ensure the raider experiences your world.”
“Second is the fun part – fortification. To bring out the best in your Outpost, think strategically. You decorate. Your space should be personal and meaningful. Cosmetics can also help to confuse the minds of raiders. A trail of lights, something that catches your eye in a corner – you want them to get confused, lost, and distracted by just the right thing as you hit them with your traps.”
“You need to take your time and think what you want the raider to experience,” adds Inouk. “Maybe you’re not even looking to create the deadliest Outpost, but rather take the raider on a very specific journey. It’s all possible. Just decide on a direction and start building.”
Duality
No matter whether your preference is for raiding or building, it doesn’t really matter which part you prefer. It helps to understand the differences.
“What I love about raiding is that everything I come across has actually been built by another player. And it’s all been crafted to kill me,” says Ash. “It’s also through raiding that you come to understand a lot of the subtleties of building as you deconstruct guard/trap combos to see how they managed to get you, and then implement those ideas in your own Outpost.”
“I believe that the best builders are also raiders,” finishes Inouk. “It’s all about discovering setups you may never have thought of on your own. Raiding is my best source of inspiration as a builder.”
Meet Your MakerS in 2023|S.
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