Flame On!

We’ve had it in our heads for a long time now, that this Oil Sands level that we were creating was going to be a hazardous level to play in. While admittedly it’s looked pretty straight forward until now, that’s because it’s really only been half complete. It’s now like… 60% complete. Or something.

I’m still trying to refine this into something that I’m happy with. At the moment this is just a prototype. Expect the flame animation, colors, lighting, and the way it ignites to change… but I thought that it would still be worth showing off a snippet of what we’re expecting out of the level.

The idea is that we’ve got a multi-tiered level to play in… you can wade through the oil, jump up onto the rocks, or up onto the bridge in the middle. But if someone gets their mitts onto a weapon such as a molotov, or a flame thrower… well… the rocky areas are going to become your best friends quite quickly. The safe spots should be a little more clear in the end than this image would indicate. It was a pretty quick attempt at getting a proof of concept, and thus it’s not being masked particularly accurately at the moment.

And that’s why I say it’s only 60% done at the moment. I’ve got some ideas for how this is going to work, but there’s going to be a lot that will need to be done on Matt’s end to make this all work too.

Aside from the purely artistic and technical things of getting it to work, there’s also the question of how this should work in practice. For example… I expect that the fire will be able to be put out… but since I also expect characters to be able to catch on fire, I’m honestly not sure what the odds are that players will be able to keep the oil free of new sources of fire for any meaningful amount of time. Should characters be able to recover from fire -or should it set them ablaze and give them a timer that they can run around wreaking havoc until they die? Should they be able to move around freely in the fire – or should they bounce out of it immediately and take damage?

I’m looking forward to this coming together some more so that I can get these questions answered!