Resogun's Harry Kruger: "One single frame drop can be devastating"

In the first part of my interview with Resogun”s lead programmer Harry Kruger talked about Housemarque”s inspiration for the game, end of level bosses and PlayStation 4 share clips. In this final part Kruger covers some of the in-game and online features and what the “throw human” trigger does on the PS4 controller.

Do you have other game modes planned on top of the single-player game?
Harry Kruger: Yes, the one that I can confirm for now is that we will have online multiplayer, that”s online co-op. That”s two ships playing through the same levels. It”s possible that we might add some other modes too.

The bottom of the screen, that”s all destructible then?
HK: That”s one of the key things about Resogun. It”s similar to Stardust in the way that you have lots of things to shoot, lots of explosions and you have one background there. But with the power of the PS4 we”ve been able to convert all that stuff into dynamic destructible environments.

The environments are built from these individual cubes and with every single explosion, every enemy destroyed, every smart bomb unleashed you chip away layers of cubes from the world. By the end of the level you can see it”s not exactly in the same state as when you first started. Of course, as we mentioned before, when you do finish the level you get to witness its full destruction in all its glory. In slow-motion of course.

Have you started optimising the game yet?
HK: Until now we”ve had nbso online casino reviews a lot of freedom pushing and adding more and more stuff. There are some bits that have been optimised but the game isn”t obviously final so there is still a lot of cycles left to optimise within the game. I think we will be able to crank it up a little bit more but make sure it is always rock solid at 60 frames per second (FPS). The main thing is, in a shooter especially, even one single frame drop can be devastating. We want to make sure that 60 FPS is always maintained. That”s a must for us.

Clearly you guys love explosions and having loads of stuff whizzing about the screen
HK: Is that really evident? [laughs]

On the control side you have boost, overdrive and throw human. Throw human?
HK: Yeah, that”s a bit of a test that we put in that some of us ended up liking so we kept it. When you kill the glowing enemies you unlock humans from their chambers. Then you pickup the human and one thing I love to do, and this is inseparable from my personal play style, is boost and throw the human [into the escape pod] from a larger distance.

What”s overdrive then?
HK: Once again we go back to the voxels and all of the enemies are composed of them and fully destructible. You can see the destruction model a little bit in the end-level boss which is going to be a lot more detailed in the final game. All of these enemies have these core green cubes that are like the enemies energy and once you destroy them you get to absorb it.

As you collect these green energy cubes you fill up your overdrive bar and once that”s full you can unleash overdrive and inflict massive damage and watch plenty of super cool particle effects fly around. This is also going to be tied to our scoring system eventually so you”ll need to master all of these individual elements in order to make the best possible score.

Just like in previous Housemarque games the highscore table is all important then?
HK: It”s kind of like a measurement of your skill. We really dislike having any random elements or rewarding the player where they don”t really earn it. The better you play the game the higher your score will be and the better your position in the leader boards.

Thanks for your time.

Resogun will be a PlayStation 4 launch title and also free to PS subscribers.