Dropping In | Slow Rush Studios

With abilities now being customized by collected perks, it wasn't fun to start over each time you died.

And that's doubly true with how easy it is to kill yourself - or be killed by fatal friendly fire!

But.. in this game where the entire level can be destroyed, how should respawning even work?

Resetting vs Respawning

So you're innocently walking around, and then suddenly, unpredictably, and through no fault of your own - BOOM! You're dead, and the level restarts.

Dramatic re-enactment.

Now the question is: should you keep any collected perks when you respawn?

On the one hand, yes, sure, you collected them fair and square.

But on the other hand, respawning also resets the level, so you can just keep dying to collect more and more and more perks.

Hello friend, it is I, that one level 99 player who only ever plays the first level over and over just to farm for upgrades.

One option was to reset the level, but remove already-collected perks. But then players would be incentivized to just run past enemies, which is boring. ¹

So I knew I needed to separate player respawns from resetting the level.

Designing Respawns

You can actually respawn a friend already, by running all the way back to the start of the level and touching the spawn-point. ²

I modeled that on Broforce's approach (which also has in-level checkpoints that trigger respawns), but:

It doesn't work when playing singleplayer - nobody's there to respawn you!
Running backwards is cowardly (boo!) and slows down the action.

So I introduced the age-old solution of adding "lives": when you die, you can respawn until you run out of lives.

We'll paint these walls red! (Yeah!) With blood! (Yeah!) With our blood! (yea-- wait, what?) Until we run out of lives! (I.. this doesn't sound so fun anymore..)

Problem is, respawning at the start of the level doesn't work so well if your mate Tim has destroyed the only bridge over an otherwise-impassable chasm.

Ideally I wanted something that:

Is fast-paced & feels good. ³
Works equally well in singleplayer and multiplayer.
Lets the dead player control when to respawn (if at all). ⁴
Copes with both destroyed terrain and players falling to their death. ⁵

Drop Pod Respawns

Inspired by the fact that player characters (accidentally) look like they're wearing space suits,⁶ I realized that drop pods tick all the boxes:

Landing in a drop-pod feels cool, and you can steer them a little to smush an enemy - and you never have to run through bits of the level you've already completed (or destroyed).

Known issue: right now you instantly respawn into a drop pod after dying, which can be confusing!

The only problem was how to handle caves - or other cases where terrain would block a drop-pod. Sure, I could make drop pods tunnel through terrain, but I also didn't want players stuck in a vertical shaft.

My solution is to let the drop pods cut through terrain, but only sometimes:

Drop pods cut through terrain, but once they approach another player (or the position the player died), then they switch into crash-landing mode, where hitting terrain ejects the player.

The implementation still has lots of rough edges⁷ but it feels pretty good already.

Magical Wizards in Drop Pods

But wait, how are our magical wizarding player characters riding these futuristic drop pods?

I think the answer is: they aren't. More on that another time!

Playable web build‎

You can try out the drop pods here!

Tip: you can exit one early by jumping (W or Space), which is helpful if the drop-pod is carrying you into a deadly chasm - although if you do it while the pod is still thrusting downwards you may catch yourself alight!

Press F1 for help, including to see keyboard/mouse controls. Mobile devices probably won't work! By playing you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.

Though I can say that exactly zero playtesters worked out how to respawn co-players without hints - which is never a good sign.

Also I am experimenting with enemies dropping money (a story for another day), and having previously-killed enemies not drop money would be both annoying to implement and not so fun for players.

Meaning no player should remain out of the action for too long, but also that the actual respawning should be satisfying to make up for the low of dying earlier. (So no trudging backwards!)

⁴

I think letting the dead player choose when to respawn is important to handle the "oiii, Tim, get back here! You're alive again! ... Oh wait, nevermind" case. (Tim really needs to get his bladder checked out)

But it also helps if a player feels like they're just a liability in some boss battle: they can choose not to respawn.

And specific to this game, I'm thinking it's a good idea to let players adjust their perk loadout before respawning (in case their last death was a suicide due to a fatal perk configuration).

⁵

Because "walk to Tim and press X to revive them" doesn't work so well if Tim's corpse has fallen off the level.

⁶

Also Helldivers.

⁷

Aside from needing a slightly delay after death so you can actually register that you're dead, you'd probably expect the drop pods to actually stick around in some form instead of instantly disappearing.