Originally titled Supermass and very different from the game you see released in the trailer, Drifters – Loot the Galaxy is a fun Overwatch-style arena shooter I worked on with unique grappling and thruster movements to drastically alter the conventional gameplay of the genre.

It’s pretty fun and I enjoy the grappling mechanics. It was a blast to work on the gameplay team for it. As the studio’s first big UE4 project and the first IP, it was a pretty new experience all around for everyone and required a lot of figuring things out on your own. This was reflected in how the game drastically changed over the course of development.

The third person perspective was always there, which gives it that Gears of War feel…but not much else remained the same. The original placeholder graphics were very indie but also carried with them a completely different style of game. It was a planet-centric design where each team controlled planets as a whole and you could walk fully around them. Once capturing a planet, its turret system would be activated and fire upon enemies that tried to take it.

With the thrusting maneuvers and simple combat, it reminded me very much of an old game called Plain Sight. The original characters for this looked like small robots that were very similar to the ones in that game. Albeit one of my favorites, that game met a swift end after a half year or so. While still playable, it has had no players ever since. It is a shame that some games that come up with a nonstandard, innovative style of play don’t end up lasting too long.

While Supermass was great fun in that stage, the direction completely changed to become much more like Overwatch. While still fun in its own right, the gameplay was really just completely different and can’t be directly compared. That version of the game was early in development and not fully fleshed out anyway, but I do still wonder what could have been if it stayed on that course.

Incidentally, the final version of Drifters that it became reminds me of another very fun game of old. That game is Tribes: Ascend. The very unique jetpacking combat that I haven’t seen in many games since was the centerpiece of that game, so it makes sense to draw comparisons to Drifters where drifting (basically using a jetpack) is also such a core component. That game fared a bit better, remaining popular enough for a few hundred players for a decade before finally dwindling out a few years ago.

Such is the fate of multiplayer games. They don’t always stick around forever unless they are a mega hit like Halo, but that kind of gives a special quality to being able to play them while they are alive that makes them all the more precious. Anyway, I have gone off on a bit of a tangent so let’s get back on track…

The characters came to life and gained personalities and different abilities, echoing the facets of many free to play games. The AAA quality graphics for everything came in and the planets along with basically all the gravity shenanigans were dropped in favor of a more typical arena stage. The game focused majorly on grappling and attach points were added to nearly every surface so the combat became a lot more fast-paced with players zipping around and dropping from the sky.

I was tasked with fleshing out the abilities for one of the characters when I joined the project. The character was named Magne, and the art for her wasn’t done yet so she used the model for the Resistor character. This was confusing for many reasons because I now associate my work most closely with Resistor, who has none of the abilities! Magne could place turrets that would autotarget people, so similar to the engineer in Team Fortress 2. If hit by a bullet from any of these turrets or Magne’s main weapon, they would gain magnetization debuffs that would make all of Magne’s metallic weapons deal more damage.

All of this flowed well with her overall play style, which came together with her super ability of summoning a massive tornado that pushed characters around and made their movement difficult. If magnetized, the tornado would additionally shoot out a stream of shrapnel at them like a laser beam. The way these abilities supported and melded each other was awesome and led to a very rewarding play as your moves stacked up to bring down the enemy team.

I worked very closely with the designer on all these abilities, who was still coming up with them and the intricacies at the same time that I was coding them to be in the game. This fast iteration combined with the weekly playtests to get instant feedback and come up with tweaks was exactly the kind of development that I love. Everyone was really invested in the game and thinking critically on how to improve things, especially since they would affect our own enjoyment during the playtests.

One of the cooler features I implemented was a hazard system for the game. These were sort of cartoonish traps and such that existed on the map, like lava pits and electrical fields. As it felt very rewarding to knock players into these traps, I coded up a subtle system that would redirect players you had knocked back into these traps. Of course it would seem unfair if players noticed this, but it only added to the enjoyment because it was not easily detectable. It only shifted the movement slightly if the knockback direction was within 5-10 degrees, so it made opponents fall into these traps a lot more often without looking like the direction was really changed.

To take full advantage of this system, I naturally registered the tornado spawned by Magne’s super ability as one of these hazards. It led to the game feeling much more dynamic as a whole with all the additional traps going off and damage being dealt. You also had to play more strategically so as not to position yourself between your opponents and these hazards – making you much more environment aware. You weren’t just fighting the enemy team, but the course as well.