PC Games: Writhe & Fall

The Writhe – a bio-mechanical organism has emerged and has taken over a small area of the UK.
As the human faction, you must attempt to rescue as many civilians as possible and will face many dilemmas – with limited resources and choices being compounded by the damage done to the infrastructure and need to support civilian evacuation – whilst fighting back the Writhe.

As the Writhe, you must grow and expand and consume as much bio-matter as possible, with humans cognitive powers, enabling you to become more intelligent. Ambush, deceive, burrow and writhe your way to dominance. You must grow and survive against an asymmetric opponent – whilst ensuring your food source cannot escape and curtail your plans.

You can follow the development of Writhe & Fall (working title) at www.writheandfall.com or sign up for Ealy access below.

Summary

Writhe & Fall blends the combination of a Reverse Horror game (we love Carrion) with an RTS game mechanics routed in Urban and Combined Arms warfare; all played out inside of a fully destructible environment.

The complexity of these scenes – based on real-locations answers the “I bet could beat the Blob / Thing / Alien / Invasion” itch we have all felt. But life isn’t simple – and the civilians must be rescued or absorbed. By allowing the player to play as both the Military and Administrative forces of the humans against a seemingly malignant and unknown force – we force dilemmas onto both players.

Reveal yourself to quickly and the humans can react fast and force you to use your resources in defence or attack instead of evolving. The Writhe player can choose to attack infrastructure to deny capabilities to the opponent – or distract them to force resource away, or evolve new capabilities to combat theirs.

The data mapping allows us to produce a series of stages and phases – from which we can direct the individual and group entities to traverse that contested space – call in support and react to the changing terrain and support available. We are keen to avoid CPM (click per minute) mechanics and embrace the ability to shape the battlespace, the contest over civilians as a resource and the use of infrastructure to move, ambush and deny capabilities to your opponent.

From patient zero (we’re not a zombie game) to the use of a Nuclear weapon to contain the threat. Your choices will determine the outcome of this fight and the future of humanity.

Playing with data driven assets

As you can see in more detail elsewhere on the site, we have the ability to not only produce the form of an object, but add data values to it. Enabling vulnerabilities and weakpoints to be added to creatures, vehicles and inherent properties to be added, augmented, or damaged.

This allows for a highly dynamic fight – allowing some vehicles to tear through buildings, and other creatures to even rip off parts of a structure and hurl them, to burrow or target specific points. For instance a swarm of smaller creatures can disable systems on a vehicle or attack the engine (focussing on heat and emissions) to disable the vehicle without having to destroy it completely. Meaning the vehicle might be repaired or recovered.

Likewise a wounded Writhe creature can be felled without killing it, and can be captured to research or re-absorbed by the Writhe or re-grown.

Units, Clutter and Procedural generation

We’re now actively working on creating the base assets for the game. You can see some early test with different Voxel models around the size and scale and theme.

Single threaded physics

This means mega destruction on a GPU in realtime. All the Chaos!

Come and join our Early Access programme.

High and low complexity models and scenes

Since the engine works based on common properties we’ve been experimenting with different scales and permitting some levels to be played out in higher detail – or having some areas with more detail.

Drones and fire

We can generate pathfinding for semi autonomous manoeuvre and use a swarm of UAVs for stress testing. We also want to use splines for the pathfinding in environments using a field based technology to make this dynamic and realistic – and fun!

We think we can support many thousands of these – having already developed a fast method to manage and determine spline generation on the fly.

Building details – roof layouts

We can generate roofs and even down to tiles – at 25cm resolution – meaning you can chip away at a tile, or punch through, burn it or even just survey it’s thermal properties to see if there is still a Civilian in there, or if the Writhe have occupied it.

Don’t like the layout of your house, jump in edit the details or voxel model, and bake it back into the scene. Then share it back with the community. A lot of these maps will have human tuned elements – and we also want to have different stages in the crisis.

Playing with Infrared Data in an Urban Environment

As we mature this component we will add in internals and infrastructure – to make it more fun, explosive and combustible. Sometimes the safest route is go through the wall and not around it.

User driven feedback

We’ve been incredibly lucky to receive some amazing feedback from different communities online.
We want to make the game you want to play.

We’ve created a few online groups to facilitate this – and to sweeten the deal will offer some free Steam Keys to our Beta testers and the biggest and best contributors.

What’s amazing is to see a real appetite for the sorts of dynamics and mechanics Polaron engine unlocks. We can’t build them all in one go – therefore we’d much rather build the best the community has to offer and get their feedback.

Destructible terrain in RTS games
byu/Urban-Hawk-Intel inRealTimeStrategy

Some concept highlights

I think its a great feature because it creates a dynamic battlefield.
For example in Men of War all the craters can act as cover for advancing infantry.

Or a tank driving through a wooden building opens up a new route of attack.
Stuff like that is really cool.den building opens up a new route of attack.

Stuff like that is really cool.

It also creates interesting choices like i can blow up this building but I can also assault it and use it as a new anchor point for an attack.

Sproeier

We really like this concept – and it’s part of the materials and demolition theme, we’ve been assembling and augmenting a huge database of values for materials. A modern brick house is hard, a Victorian brick house is often much softer, wood vs steel and stone vs concrete, etc

The main thing is creating new tactical situations, and maybe not even intentionally.

There’s the obvious, destroying a bridge, etc, but Tiberian sun already had those.

Then there’s the thing: big battles might inadvertently change the terrain as to make it impracticable, more difficult to traverse, or change how units van take cover in it. For instance, a long plain suddenly becomes rough terrain, where there are many options to obfuscate like of sight, or where vehicles move slower.

Perhaps even a tunnelling unit/option so that maybe units can go through a mountain, for a surprise attack or a better logistical option, or maybe pull of a Messines contingency.

Now deleted account.

This is great feedback and we’d been thinking about the sub-t environment as well as the very large scale destruction of an urban or peri-urban area. Giant mines are clearly going to be fun as are the constraints on manoeuvre that create dilemmas and consequences of action.

Do you have materials in the simulation? Because if you do you can really go wild. You could have soft soil that heaver units can’t move through, buildings be physically objects that leave rubble when destroyed, so now fighting in an area would drastically change what kind of units you could use there.

Bigger_then_cheese

We are making a massive database and want to shape the capabilities and manoeuvrability of each unity around this, as well as supporting fires and effects.

In order for the effort to pay off, you need to think about how this destruction of the environment is supposed to affect the gameplay. For example, in StarCraft 2 there are very simple objects – rocks to be destroyed, which can block (collapse) or unblock a road. A simple mechanism, but it has a real impact on gameplay.

In recent Stormgate alpha gameplay showcasing we can see trees that only smaller units can squeeze through, but there are ways to destroy trees and create passages through which anything can squeeze (big units too). Graphically, it’s not particularly complex, but it’s cool because it affects gameplay and it will give you opportunity to make strategic decisions (I destroy trees to create a shortcut for my units, but at the same time I create a passage for enemy units, or I go a long way).

In Warcraft 3 trees was a resource and by cutting them player influenced the shape of the map.

Wraithost

This is a key point – that we think should become more important as the damage increases. Therefore preventing or fostering the preservation of some areas and the destruction of others and canalising attacks.

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Occupy the Highstreet, hospital, powerplant, railway, etc

We think that some locations can also hold a strategic value, e.g. rescuing a hospital or defending it, or being forced to attack it or deny the enemy resources creates a lot of dynamics and shapes the missions and objectives. It may also be possible to lure in or boobytrap and mine certain areas, making it costly to assault outright and allowing for the orchestration of multi-pronged attacks, feints, deception and encirclement.