Run for your lives!

Published: 2011-12-15

Author: Santamon

Just occasionally, we like to take a break from developing RP and experiment a bit. This often involves trying to create new and exciting gamemodes or maps for existing gamemodes. Normally, we only get so much from them, however we’ve been working on a new gamemode in light of the Garrysmod 13 update which removes a number of irritating limitations – namely Edicts! In the current source engine build, you can only have 4k Ents, split between networked and none networked ents – this has now been upp’d to a very sweet 32k ents.

What does this mean for us? For RP, it’s a god send because as many of you may remember, we made a blog post which basically said we’re fucked if they don’t up it.

So what’s this new gamemode? The idea behind it was simple, a sort of mix between Deathrun and TTT / Zombie Escape. The objective is to escape from a maze, whilst the maze is trying to kill you and also whilst there are a few random ‘traitors’ in the maze who are out to hinder you and/or kill you.

This bought up a world of problems, such as how can ‘traitors’ kill people and how can the people trying to escape from the maze put up a fight? It would seem too TTT like to simply add guns and would break the theme of certain maps. The simple answer was to add a Karma meter like TTT and allow people to punch each other to death – whilst giving the ‘traitor’ the ability to ‘snap necks’. This means that whilst a ‘traitor’ can ‘snap’ someones neck and kill them, if their friends are about, then that ‘traitor’ is dead and won’t get anything! Whilst ‘traitor’ is not really the correct term, it probably sums them up best - think of them like a prisoner who’s been given an extra role.

You’re also racing against the clock to get out!

There is a fair bit more to it than that, but we’ll skip on details as it’s still under heavy development at the moment and most stuff is subject to change.

With this simple gamemode idea, came another dilemma. The Maps. The issue with maze maps is that people can begin to form patterns and after a while, just learn the way to the exit.

Taking this dilemma, I came up with a solution. A procedural maze generation – kind of. I took a theme I’ve like in the past which is the Cube movie theme (If you’ve not watched it, you’re missing out) where a bunch of ‘prisoners’ have to escape from a cube structure where the rooms can kill them – ties in perfectly with our gamemode.

After about a week’s development, I designed the bastard of all maps. Taking Lord Ivan’s pre-made Cube Textures, I designed a massive cube structure that was randomly generated each time you played it.

The maze itself is 9x9x9 which means it has a whopping 729 rooms. Each of these rooms can be one of seven colours and has a set chance of containing a trap. A cube map was made a while back by Lord Ivan which was 4x4x4 and so had 64 rooms – a brilliant map, however once you knew the escape route, all challenge was lost.

Due to the random nature of my map, in theory, you will never play the same map twice. It works by spawning each cube around you as you progress through the maze – this means that only areas which players have explored will be generated, hence why the size of the map can be so large. Here are some pictures:

What are your thoughts on this? Think we should continue?