BLOGS

At StickyLock Games we’re all working on Histera, but in vastly different areas and we want to give everyone a chance to share their work! Today we’re talking about the Glitch and everything around it with our gamedev Jordi!

MAKING THE GLITCH WORK

We’re talking to Jordi today, one of the developers for Histera. He is responsible for implementing one of the most exciting features of Histera: The Glitch.

Jordi van Duijn || DEVELOPER

“If we had to pick the one mechanic that makes Histera unique and which sets it apart from all other FPS’s out there, it would be our glitch mechanic. This mechanic glitches part of the level to a different era while playing. It alters the layout and visuals of the level, introducing unique era-specific weapons and forcing players to change their strategies on the fly. The inner workings of the glitch have changed over time and came with many challenges, so we’d like to take you on the journey that brought us to the glitch as it is today.”

WHERE IT ALL STARTED

“The glitch has always been the core of Histera. From the very beginning we have wanted to be able to dynamically change the level during a match. In the earliest stage, the complete level changed to a different era, where a first wave from the center would glitch out the current era, and a second wave would glitch in the next era. Later on, we realized that changing parts of the level would introduce much more interesting gameplay dynamics and visuals. This concept got us all very excited but introduced a lot of challenges and raised questions like: Which part of the level should glitch? How do parts of different eras connect? How do we guarantee that all eras that will ever be created (by us or by players using our level-editor) won’t create dead-ends or holes in the borders?”

THE CHALLENGES

One of the earliest and hardest challenges we faced was scalability: How do we guarantee that all eras will always connect to each other seamlessly? The solution came in the form of a strict border layout and a set of border rules. After some testing we decided to go with 5 sections: 2 bases and 3 lanes. Every section has borders connected to other sections. Per border, we have a set number of gates, let’s say about 10. A border goes both ways, so we have 10 gates from section A to B and 10 from B to A. Now we can guarantee at least 1 passage between A and B if we introduce the rule that at a minimum 6 gates (50% + 1) have to be open. Another obvious rule is that the floor-height at the borders should always be the same, or we would get height-differences. These and a couple of other minor rules gave us the confidence that we could proceed with this version of the glitch.

Another big challenge is asset loading. Usually in online multiplayer fps games, every player has to load the level they are going to play and wait for all other players to finish loading before the match can start. In Histera, we glitch a part of the level during a match, which means that new assets have to be loaded in on the fly without causing performance issues for the players. Unity’s DOTS architecture can load in scenes and assets very efficiently in the background without causing performance issues, but this still takes some time. For this we created a glitch anticipation phase that takes enough time for all players to load in the required assets. Besides this, we are still working on more ways to ensure a smooth transition of eras without giving players any performance issues.

Apart from these challenges, we had to think about various things such as: How will the glitch affect gameplay? What will it look like? What will it sound like? How often does a glitch happen? What happens with players who are inside a glitch? Every one of these questions deserves their own DevLog though, so you have much more to look out for!

SEE YOU NEXT WEEK!

WISHLIST HISTERA ON STEAM

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