Making A House Call: Intruder
Intruder is a forthcoming Unity-powered multiplayer tactical FPS that's been in development for barely two months from a two man team and I'm already excited. As the team explains in their notes, inspiration is strongly felt from the SWAT series with the mission statement of "stealth and cunning over twitch gameplay". The tense thinky combat is already on show, even if the build is so alpha nobody can see their own hands yet. What's getting me so interested this early is how developers Superboss Games are handling doors. Click through for a demonstration video, but remember to check your six.
As you can see, opening doors isn't as clumsy as running up to one and jabbing E to have it fly open regardless of where the hinges are. Rather, you'll be using the mouse wheel to slowly crack open the door, letting you sneak the mirror cam in and scout out the room. The video description states that the "rate of scrolling determines how much/fast the door will open". Which is brilliant, right? Controlling access to space so finely as you creep around waiting for death to pop up sits it squarely in the Amnesia park of horror, even if the developers only meant it to enable tactical planning.
The feeling of slowly pushing open a door when there's the possibility of a bunch of humans with guns fixed squarely at the balsa wood inches from your face is a frightening prospect. There's a lot of potential to be had with these kinds of tension-building systems, and I'd love a multiplayer game played in constant crouch mode, waiting, anticipating, dreading combat. The mirror cam also shown in that video would be key in making me sweat - the feeling of being watched by hidden players, eyes on the back of my head. Or the thrill of spying on the other team as I work on a plan to take them down. It's a feeling Superboss seem intent on capturing, explaining in the introductory video below that Intruder will be "more about using the gadgets and the environment, thinking ahead of your opponent as opposed to just being the twitchiest or the fastest."
This was released a scant month ago and already shows a winning adherence to simulation, with gravity and wind affecting bullet trajectory amongst other features expanded upon its original incarnation as an aborted Unreal mod. Check out more development notes on their site over here.
One to watch.