Housemarque on battle royale with cheese

[Music] just to introduce myself in what we're doing Michael Xavier from a little rock band called house mark we used to make really cool arcade games that different really sell that well so last year year I was here talking about what are we gonna do next and then now we have something to show or we've been showing something for a little bit of while already this is the clicker all right cool so let's start off with a with an audience survey at first my first question is how many of you are working on a battle royale type game I'm probably you guys over here for sure okay how many of you who play these battle royale type games this is a bunch more okay that's pretty good alright how many of you think it's a really bad idea to put a battle royale game out in this market situation all

right yeah I get the gist all right so that's what we're talking about here this is Battle Royale with cheese and in this case it means what does housemarque add to a genre that's already been defined by if you ask the Internet at least that's what's been done so storm diverse is the game we're gonna launch with a battle royale mod and it's gonna be a lot more than that but I'll show you some really really old stuff so this is from early 2015 we got the first pitch for the game from internal from all the game pitches that we have have come from from our employees so this is actually from me co-ed a lot one of our concept artists it was still working there at that point and when we all saw it it was very like a WoW situation so yeah that the name has changed that's what this is indicating here but we'll get to that in just a bit so what really started off the pitch was

trying to define what we're trying to do and at that point battle royale was a very very small niche genre which sounds crazy but it was there was only a few titles out there h1z1 you know king of the kill at least was coming out and and there was a lot of this mod seeing stuff that probably you guys you guys played but these are the defining factors that we wanted to put into this game which was we were defining it Smash Brothers meets hunger games and of course the movie the Japanese movie battle royale was one of the bigger influences on what we wanted to do so yeah rules of the games is that you battled the death only one survives that's pretty simple and if you have teams then that means more than one of the still same rules apply and the environment closes in it doesn't mean that it this has to be had defined sort of thing but it's it's just as the player amount decreases you gotta work

with environment to keep things chaotic so we wanted people to be always moving and always looking for a safe place which really didn't exist and and our addition to this formula at that point was defined as events in game events of just [ __ ] going on and so we wanted these random events all events are random to really define what are the rules and confines that the players then experience on top of the base formula so that's where it kind of started from and now to demonstrate the very early pitch an idea and by the way nobody has seen this outside of our company so bear bear in mind that not everything is kosher or on par to what you expect from from game pitches but this is a very experimental thing so we just want to show you what we started with in 2015 and this has

sound so we'll see how it flies welcome to Killa games the most brutal game on earth let's get right down to the business here we have the arena and red in the middle and obstacle courses on the way to the arena and last person to the arena will be killed eight players use the guy with the red bandana and the first guy's already out too bad so sad but now he's a villain he's out to get you in a monster for clothes didn't we have this call it's big gun so everybody's blasting with rockets all around the playing field and eventually what happens the second guy is down t-mod teams of three find your friends get close to them to get that defense buff and then go hunt out the other team and try to kill them as fast you can remember there's only two guys monsters on the playing field at this moment Blazers we're gonna add little hazards like lasers which are basically red beams of light coming from the sky trying to get you look around don't stay in one place where you might get killed eventually the third guys gonna get killed it's so coops off things change work with it next thing that we can have this a volcano so I'm gonna look out

huge mountain grows from the middle of the playing field and a lava start spewing everywhere the surroundings are gonna be filled with lava so you have to get to the higher ground jump around on these little rocks and eventually fourth guy gets killed off and there's four more players left to fight for their lives another hazard missiles is introducing this pump all you see are these targets moving around you if you stayed still for too long they will kill you as a missile is heading for your head but wait let's recap a little bit you have monsters behind you you have missiles you have lasers and you're climbing a huge volcano with lava everywhere crazy right and again wheaty mother so two more guys on each team get together you're lucky you'll find the guy next to you bromance is in the air go out to kill the other two guys now what happens is two more guys left go off us off that bromance didn't last for too long but hey it's your time to kill that friend of yours you happen to be a lucky guy and you actually anticipated this push him off the cliff down to the fiery pits below this means you get the final kill good job you win the game and that has

been another episode of the killing games there you go round of applause so anybody raise your hand if that is our battle royale game to you maybe yes a little bit is it different than okay okay so that's what we felt as well at this point we were just looking to transition to you know things that we haven't done at all or in a long time like third-person perspective multiplayer Center games and we wanted to really bring a lot of that arcade heritage that we we actually know how to do so that was the barrage of events and and all that stuff but this has been very interesting road because from that we of course then started pitching is sort of prototyping it a little by little it's now devolved into something

that very different or maybe still has that thin red line that we're trying to follow I'll give you an example of what kind of events we tried to think about early on so we want to take you on this mysterious island and it's going to be like an island like every other batter Oriole game but still at this point we felt like we could do something kind of different so we started designing really cool environments and thinking of how would these environmental effects then change the surroundings that you're playing in so imagine that you're in a grotto there's you know different planes of the level clearly the design is going for something that you can jump and even jetpack up and maybe look down and and go through these places or it's clearly it's it's difficult to to maybe see your enemies and a line of sight just from from happenstance actually reminds me of

a very destiny type of a crucible level to be honest so now that we have this environment that we want to create we started thinking what could you do then to just totally change that really just take the basics and then and try to flip it over so we came up with it this is one is flush the toilets yes that was really the name for the events but basically you introduce water into a cave system or any open system for example and the physics take over and you end up pushing all the players to a single central location of course that makes sense from from any Battle Royale perspective you want to push players together because then they'll be killing more but that was just one of the ideas we want to do environmental level design as well in the end that ended up being a very you know a big task and currently we've been focusing on a lot of these events that are viable throughout levels not just in

a single location but it gives you an idea of what kind of environmental effects were going for so let's show the game as it is currently you come in on the drop pod there's a very sci-fi environment you have three classes to suit to choose from but every class has a glider so you always fly you can always do that we have lots of this environmental effects wind goes well with the name storm divers you're shooting a lot of people but yeah there you go that's the tornado events but you have a lot of these skills as well so the three classes have and things that relate to your movement so for example have a jet pack and fly open sky and get some more verticality but

yet especially the tornado that's really a thing that where we're trying to focus on now to really create a differentiated play field and it's just one of those things that doesn't always come across we've gotten a lot of [ __ ] on YouTube don't always listen to all the comments they don't know what's going on half the time but then it's your job to inform and really get the people on board by letting them know what are the things that you're really working towards and then trying to create that's that's different and and we see this as our first multiplayer game of course meaning there's a lot of opportunities for us to do with it but that this is a my my personal way of describing it is it's it's uncharted but in multiplayer so we just want a lot of crazy [ __ ] to happen all the time yeah that was that was top

secrets not so secret anymore and we know that it's an uphill battle but we're definitely up for the challenge and in the end we want to bring not only what you've seen here now but also the things that make it house mark and as there are a lot of ideas that we've had before in the past we think that there's a lot of things that we can actually draw from as inspiration going forward but yes it's it's it's we're going from a niche arcade market and the probably the the most toughest market in the past decade which is now battle royale so let's see how that goes thank you [Applause] [Music]