![]() This helped us frame and visualize the threats your average prospector would face on a drop. With that gritty “miners in space” vibe comes the very real dangers of the frontier industry. We all wanted some of that manual, industrialized space tech seen in classic 80s sci-fi to be a big part of Icarus. The core themes presented in those seminal pieces definitely colored what manifested as Icarus' lore. We watched Alien, Jodorowsky's Dune, Prospect, and a few other movies to get the early members of the team inspired by our favorite sci-fi. When it came to the thematic inspirations for Icarus, we pulled heavily from movies and source material we loved. The core idea of breaking up the survival experience into sessions with a prospector having to come and go from a planet's surface came from these post-mortems. Icarus, as a core idea, was a brainchild of Dean Hall after reflecting on the successes and shortcomings of DayZ. What inspired that story and how did it impact the game’s design?Ĭarnall: A lot of the people at RocketWerkz came together over shared interests and hobbies. Icarus features a compelling backstory that has players dropping down onto a deadly planet in hopes to scavenge supplies in the allotted time before they must return to their orbital home or die. This does mean that at least one person must be online for a game session to be “live,” but given our title is PVE, it helps not having to worry about the game state being actively hosted when no one is online. Think of it as a shared save file that anyone can pull down and use to rebuild the game state when they choose to host. We leaned heavily on scalable microservice architecture here, so not only were prospects very cheap to host, but we could scale up to large concurrency numbers with no issue. Each prospect is registered on our backend and that game session blob is stored in an in-memory store database. ![]() To achieve this, we decided to effectively take the local serialized state of a prospect game session (thanks to UPROPERTY reflection and structured Archives), and upload that as a binary blob. However, we still wanted players to have a sense of progression and persistence within each prospect. ![]() Session-based survival meant we were less reliant on bare-metal dedicated servers to keep a game state up for months at a time. The second layer is a little more complicated. "If it ain't broke, why fix it?" was the approach for that one. The first is your character and account persistence, which is a classic Relational Database that uses traditional key-values to store data. Can you explain the philosophy behind this approach and how it was achieved technically?Ĭarnall: There are two layers of persistence going on under the hood. The game features a level of persistence between game sessions. Survival games have had a history of being released in a state that was good for early development and community engagement but usually suffered from a usability/stability standpoint. We also wanted to make a survival game that offered a polished, high-quality experience from the get-go. This helps to avoid the “I can do anything, so what should I do” problem that can overwhelm players when being presented with a large crafting sandbox. By sessionizing the experience and giving players direct tangible goals, we felt could enhance and distill the survival experience. How does RocketWerkz hope to push the survival genre forward with Icarus?Ĭarnall: The main part of the genre we wanted to shake up was pacing and direction. ![]() Without UE, Icarus would not be in the place it is today. ![]() Especially given the similarities of Icarus’ technical requirements and that of say, Fortnite, which as a product has pushed a lot of great innovation within the engine. What Made RocketWerkz decide to use Unreal Engine?īen Carnall: UE has developed such a robust and industry-standard toolset, it feels like the default choice for any development team. ![]()
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