The first-person shooter Desperate Strike: Challenges incorporates a dexterous, enjoyable, and rewarding gameplay design in short rounds. The game's designer, Vincent Cabanas, wanted to groom all players into a dashing and uninhibited parkourer.
The three game developers, out of their love of fast-paced 90s first-person shooters and their desire to further speed up the existing racing gameplay, co-produced a game called Desperate Strike: Challenges. They described it as the result of Doom, Trackmania and Super Meat Boy.
Vincent Cabanas was responsible for the game's 3D artwork, level design, game design, and sound effects at Dream Powered Games. He walked us through the shooter's inspiration and development process, explained why Unreal Engine was the best choice for development, and how the game hopes to inspire a new generation of parkourists.
How was Dream Powered Games founded and what are the core ideas?
Vincent Cabanas, 3D artist, level designer, game designer and sound designer at Dream Powered Games: We met ten years ago when we embarked on a game development journey. As the name of the studio suggests, our core philosophy is to make the game of our dreams.
How did Dream Powered Games come up with the concept of Desperate Strike: Challenges?
Cabanas: All three members of our team were hardcore fans of the fast-paced FPS games of the '90s, so we really wanted to make a modern game that embodied the essence of our favorite games in a unique and innovative way. It requires a fast, enjoyable, and rewarding gaming experience that allows players to have fun during short game rounds. That's how we designed Desperate Strike: A Challenge, the brainchild of Doom, Trackmania, and Super Meat Boy.
Why did you decide to use Unreal Engine to make this game?
Cabanas: For us, Unreal Engine was the perfect choice: it was very powerful, but it was extremely simple to use and easy to learn.
Being able to access the full source code is a plus, which makes it easy for programmers to add new features. Unlike other engines, it's not a black box that makes you struggle.
Its large community also forms a huge advantage, as there are tons of tutorials that are very useful for getting started.
And, a bunch of our favorite Unreal games were made with this engine, so we knew it was the best choice for developing FPS games.
In describing the game, you mention Doom, Trackmania, and Super Meat Boy. Can you tell us about those games and how they impacted your design decisions?
Cabanas: We chose Doom, Trackmania, and Super Meat Boy as the main inspiration for Desperate Strike: Challenges because they put together the qualities of a good game:
Easy to learn (all FPS players can get started), but difficult to master (even the best parkourists can have fun from level 1 and strive to perfect their parkour. ）
Provide a sense of accomplishment and push players to surpass themselves
The most important thing is: fun!
Doom: With its fast-moving gameplay and exhilarating gunfight experience, it inspired the fast-paced first-person shooter section. Super Meat Boy: It offers a short level design and a "dead, start over" style gameplay to start over in no time. Trackmania: It's a strange source of inspiration for FPS games, right? That's what makes Desperate Strike so special. We didn't want it to be a traditional FPS game with a time trial bonus element. We want time trials to be at the heart of the game and motivate people to constantly challenge themselves!
So it's also very important for us to make all FPS players feel that Desperate Strike is easy to learn and difficult to learn, and it has a very high skill cap. Players can still find ways to progress after thousands of hours of play.
Although Desperate Strike and Speedway Rage are two completely different games, there are also commonalities, such as providing a medal system that motivates players to improve to reduce the best parkour performance by a few milliseconds, and has a high skill ceiling, endless replay value and fun.
Aesthetically speaking, what works have been influenced by the game's design of enemies?
Cabanas: "Mutant Pigs" is influenced by some of the famous enemies in Duke Doom 3D. The other enemies are born out of the brilliant imagination of Cecile Jaubert and Romain Pommier!
How are the game's 180 levels designed? Do you think of them as arenas with different tracks, or do you focus more on providing unique enemy groups and visuals?
Cabanas: Both. We knew we needed at least three different enemy groups, but we also wanted to offer a lot of interesting arenas, so we came up with a way: make variants.
The 180 levels are divided into three chapters, each with 60 levels. Each chapter consists of 12 unique levels, and each level has 5 variants: Normal, Hard, Very Hard, Hardcore, and Nightmare.
Not only do variants differ in difficulty levels, but also in level layouts, spawn points, monster types, weapons, and available abilities! I don't want to reveal too many details about the unlocking system, but as players become masters of Desperate Strike, bonus levels as well as "BFL" levels (surprising levels) are also unlocked.
There are 30 levels in each of these two levels, so there are 60 more than you say. So, at the end of Early Access, Desperate Will have 240 levels (180 normal levels, plus 30 bonus levels and 30 BFL levels).
How does Unreal Engine help you achieve the look and speed of your game?
Cabanas: The best thing about Unreal Engine is, of course, its dynamic lighting performance. One of our needs was to choose an engine that would work without baking lighting, which would seriously slow down our creative process.
As a small team, we had to be as efficient as possible, and Unreal Engine was able to help us do just that: we were able to make beautiful levels that ran on low-end hardware.
Because our game is very fast-paced, running at a high frame rate is even more important. In Desperate Strike, a frame rate of 120 frames per second or more will make a huge difference!
How does the team decide which abilities and weapons to add to the game? How did they affect the overall design of Desperate Strike?
Cabanas: We designed a lot of abilities and weapons, but decided to keep only the part that really fits the flow of the game. Overall (with the exception of the railgun), we prefer excellent old-fashioned "gunpowder weapons" that will create a shocking sound and feel.
While the game seems to be designed around speed, you've also incorporated some chic moves into the game, such as 360-degree turns, front flips, and backflips. What impact does this have on play, scoring, and speed in the game?
Cabanas: The only actions that affect speed are gliding and jumping. Players can even combine them into a "slide jump", which will create a huge speed thrust (parkourers do use this trick all the time!). ）。
To kill certain monsters in the top levels, 360-degree turns, backflips, and frontflips are required skills. These actions are also very interesting to perform!
This is not a special action, but a notable feature of this game is that even at high speeds, the player can strongly control the body in the air. This gives them very precise control over the character.
Can you explain how asynchronous multiplayer techniques work in games?
Cabanas: In Desperate Strike, players can play at their own pace and get the highest score they can.
Whenever a personal best is achieved, the player's time is uploaded online and displayed in the Friends Leaderboard and World Leaderboards.
In addition to the traditional leaderboards, we have developed a very special feature called "Nemesis Mode".
Players can add anyone (up to three players at a time) as nemesis, which means players can compete directly with their favorite streamer or Youtube channel owner to try to beat them in various levels.
Players will see ghostly nemesis in the game, and players will be notified if they complete the level first.
It's fun and will motivate players to strive to be the best they can and improve their skills!
You mentioned that you want to teach all players to be like pros with Desperate Strike: Challenges. How is the game going to achieve this?
Cabanas: We created a smooth learning curve and the game also offers a very strong sense of accomplishment, which are the two core elements that motivate players to keep improving.
On top of that, all kinds of players can have fun, whether they are proficient in FPS games or not.
That's what we noticed in the demo: FPS veterans can sprint through the levels like pros in a matter of minutes, while FPS casual players run first and then start using rabbit jumps or slide jumps.
In The Game Early Access, what do you want to achieve?
Cabanas: Early Access allows us enough time to finish the game while getting feedback from players so that we can make adjustments to the game and create content that the community really likes.
During a recent Realms Deep conference, we released a closed beta version that received a lot of excellent feedback and ideas from our players, allowing us to make drastic improvements to the game!
Truth be told, if you spend years developing a game, you'll be delighted when you see players love it.
In addition to doing your best to implement their feedback, it's a joy to interact with the community. This inspired us to exceed their expectations in Desperate Strike and make the best "modern old-fashioned" (hopefully that word makes sense) fast-paced FPS games possible.
Do you think Desperate Strike has the potential to enter the esports space? If so, please tell me why, and talk about how this will happen?
Cabanas: Absolutely. The game is challenging, easy to learn, and the 30-minute demo version has been played by our top players for hundreds of hours.
And, with our Early Access launch of the Level Editor and Live Multiplayer features, it definitely has the potential to host leagues!
Did Unreal Engine help you overcome some of your particular challenges? If so, can you tell us about it?
Cabanas: To be honest, it's hard to pick out one thing, but we chose Unreal Engine because of its strengths: great visuals, amazing performance, and has been used to develop several famous first-person shooters!
What's most exciting about Unreal Engine 5?
Cabanas: Its level design tools look very efficient. When we are more free, I want to try. Compared to PhysX, the Chaos system is more deterministic, which is very attractive for Desperate Strike (mainly a replay system); the "Common UI" feature seems to have made excellent improvements to the UI workflow; and The lighting effects of Unreal Engine 5 are so great!