Arcen Announce In Case Of Emergency, Release Raptor

Less than three months ago, AI Wars developer Arcen Games ran into financial bother that left the majority of their studio jobless. Now, they've announced their first 3D game - "the first of many", they say - named In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor [official forum]. Previously, Arcen planned to build a fully-fledged 3D survival game and while this isn't it, it will see the team "working on building the components for that larger game by building them into a smaller game (this one) first."

In an effort to cut costs, company founder Chris Park took to a blog post to outline how In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor will rely on the Unity Asset Store for models, animations and shaders, among other things - most of which will be tweaked or tinkered with to suit Arcen's style.

Levels will be procedurally generated, you'll assume control of a velociraptor and go toe-to-toe with robots and "other machines", and creating environments that can be torn apart by players will play an important part in how the game unfolds. Here's Park on his goals and how In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor differs from the original survival game idea:

"This game is much more short-term, will be smaller and more self-contained, and comparably inexpensive. It should be really fun, and it will be a great way for us to make something fun while also building out a lot of systems that we will then turn around and have ready for the survival game.

"One of my big goals has been to have really fun destruction in this game. Right now you can kick over crates and barrels and so forth and that can be great fun. But I want to be able to break them apart as well, which will lead into being able to do the same sort of thing to enemies, too. So that's the current task I'm working on.

"It's trickier than you might think to do it right, in a way that is efficient and meets all my requirements. I'm having to pull bits from three different destruction tools, as well as coding quite a bit myself."

It's early days yet, so no mention of a release window for now - although Park does plan to keep up a Raptor Diary over the course of development. In the meantime, full details of the announcement can be found via the Arcen Games blog.