Games
Downhill biking. Randomly-generated courses. Amazing stunts. More ways to injure yourself than it's possible to count. Welcome to RageSquid's two-wheel epic.
Fusing genres is a tricky business at the best of times – there's a reason we like to categorise game types, after all – but every now and then an example comes along which manages to pull it off, despite the seemingly incompatible nature of the genres involved. RageSquid's Descenders is one such offering; it takes the risky pastime of downhill bike racing and mashes it together with procedurally-generated landscapes right out of an RPG roguelike.
"We've all been huge fans of extreme sports games like Tony Hawk Pro Skater, SSX and Skate all our lives, and we felt like there was barely anyone making these games anymore," says RageSquid co-founder and lead coder Roel Ezendam. Founded in 2013, this small Dutch company started out by doing work for hire while their staffers were still students; before long it had enough cash in the bank to produce the madcap speedrunning platformer Action Henk, a title which arguably laid the foundations for RageSquid's second game, Descenders.
"As fans of roguelike games like FTL and Spelunky, we thought about what it would be like to combine these two genres together; to combine a downhill biking game with the freedom, risk and thrill of a roguelike," says Ezendam. "We fell in love with the result and decided to continue along that path."
And we're incredibly fortunate that they did. Descenders is quite unlike any other title on the market right now, effortlessly combining the kinetic thrill of downhill biking with the tantalisingly unpredictability of a randomly-created world. "A typical play session is much like a play session in a roguelike game," explains Ezendam. "We often tend to compare our game flow to Spelunky or FTL because the player also starts sessions and progresses through various environments until they reach the end, or until they run out of health by falling too often. There are four different environments to progress through, each with a ‘boss jump’ at the end, as a gate to the next environment."
Like all good roguelikes, there's a balance between risk and reward in Descenders. However, another key reason that it's so tense and exciting is that the physics involved are utterly convincing; when your digital avatar wraps themselves around a tree or bails on a bumpy slope, it's hard not to wince. "Getting the physics right was one of the hardest challenges early on," admits Ezendam. "A game like this makes or breaks on being able to have fun riding around. That’s why we spent several months to just get the physics right before we went on to other aspects of the game. We tried to hit that sweet spot between making it feel real, and also making sure to keep it controllable and simple to pick up."
Built on top of the superb physics engine is a stunt system which adds to Descenders' breakneck thrills; there's nothing more satisfying than pulling off the perfect trick while keeping your fragile bike on a narrow sliver of woodland dirt track. However, while other games of this type usually task the player with memorising a series of complex button presses, Descenders relies on a more elegant interface. "A big thing we tried to do with the stunts is to make it more about combining motions than hitting button combinations," Ezendam explains. "That way it becomes more about expressing a personal style, which makes it more of a genuine extreme sports experience."
The intense speed and innovative stunt system combine to make Descenders a heart-stopping experience, but it would count for little if the much-hyped, procedurally-generated levels didn't make the grade. Thankfully, this aspect of the game is perhaps the most impressive of all; despite being created on the fly, each track is packed with unique detail, making every single playthrough a refreshingly different experience. "To make sure the levels stay interesting we basically had to teach an algorithm how to design levels," Ezendam tells us. "So every step that a designer would make when building a level by hand, we translated that to a piece of code that could do this on the fly. The great thing about this is that we can just do some subtle tweaks to the input parameters, and the levels that come out are wildly different."
Descenders, like a great many PC games these days, has launched on Steam Early Access before hitting digital storefronts in its final form, and Ezendam feels getting the public's opinion is vital when it comes to shaping the product. "Steam Early Access will be crucial," he comments. "We launched a version of the game that we feel is polished and beefy enough to stand on its own already, and we’re going to see how the game is received by the community and build features according to what the players want to see. For example, features like multiplayer, spectating, streamer integrations, and a tournament mode are amazing to have, but they are things that we feel are only worth building when there’s a community large enough to support them. So now that we’ve launched the game a few days ago we’re going to keep in close touch with the players and see what they’re asking from us."
It's not just PC gamers who will get to enjoy RageSquid's latest thrill-ride – Descenders is also coming to consoles. "We’re starting with the Xbox port because Xbox has their own version of Steam’s Early Access, called Xbox Game Preview," says Ezendam. "We have laid a foundation for the Xbox port in-house and apart from a few weird issues here and there it has been a fairly smooth process. This is mainly because we’re using Unity as our game engine, which is designed to make porting easy. We’ve outsourced the porting job to our friends over at Codeglue in Rotterdam. Codeglue has helped us out before with character design and art on Action Henk and we loved working with them. Next to working on their own games they also do porting jobs so we immediately approached them when we decided to do console versions of Descenders."
When you talk about console ports it's almost impossible to avoid the topic of the Nintendo Switch, and owners of that particular system will be pleased to know that Descenders was confirmed as coming to the eShop when it was first announced back in 2017. However, the console's relative lack of power when compared to the PS4 and Xbox One is causing some headaches. "For now, we’ve only decided that we’re doing a Switch version, but we’ve not done much on the actual port yet," admits Ezendam.
"We ran early versions of the game on our dev kit but it was painfully obvious that a Switch port is going to require a lot of work; performance is a huge bottleneck when porting Descenders. We’ll also have to think about how we’re going to use the unique setup in any way but we would really like to do something fun with it. The way it’s built opens up a lot of unique opportunities that we can use to the game’s advantage, but it’s not something we’ve already planned out. For now we’re focusing heavily on the Xbox port and the PS4 port will be close after. Only then we’ll be able to get working on the Switch port."
RageSquid's second game is also notable for being the first to be published and promoted by No More Robots, a UK-based company established last year by ex-tinyBuild staffer and former games journalist Mike Rose. Pitched as a publisher which goes that extra mile for developers, No More Robots has been the perfect partner for Descenders. "Mike is an amazing guy with nothing but passion for the games he works with – maybe a bit too much, at times you can’t get him off your back!" laughs Ezendam. "With our previous game Action Henk we had a really close working relationship with our marketing person Kitty Calis, and we wanted that again with Descenders. We had our eyes on Mike for a while because we’d heard of all the good things he had done for tinyBuild and we got the idea that he really ‘gets’ how current day game marketing works. So far he has really lived up to our hype and he’s done an amazing job."
As for what Ezendam thinks will surprise players the most the first time they pick up the controller, it has to be the way the game feels. "I think people will be surprised at the amount of depth in the game’s motion and physics," he continues. "When you pick it up, it feels like you’re just cruising down slopes and making some skids and flips, but when you get deeper into the mechanics you will find out there’s pumping, scrubs, whips, wheelies, stoppies, and many more subtle mechanics to truly find your own style."
It might be a tad premature to discuss what awaits in Descenders' future, but we're going to anyway. "We haven’t given DLC or a sequel much thought yet, as we’re going to go through Early Access first," replies Ezendam. "Of course DLC in terms of cosmetics is a possibility but we want to be fair about it. For starters, doing DLC during Early Access development is a big no-no; we’ve got a game to finish before we start worrying about extra content. We’re letting the community tell us what they want during Early Access and that’s what we’re going to be focusing on moving forward. The time we spend in Early Access is also entirely dependent on which features we’re going to build so we can’t tell for sure how long that will be. Our aim is half a year to a year."
However, one project which could potentially be in RageSquid's future is a collaboration with one of the most famous skateboarders in history. The team has made no secret of the fact that they are Tony Hawk's Pro Skater fans, and No More Robots' Mike Rose has revealed that a skateboarding game figures in the studio's future plans. With Hawk admitting that he's no longer working with Activision on the famous Pro Skater brand, RageSquid and Rose have both stated that they're interested in discussing a project with him. "We'd love to make the next Tony Hawk game, and I'm currently doing everything in my power to get Tony's attention and see if he'd be up for the chat," says Rose. "The success of Descenders has definitely put us in a strong position to do it." Tony Hawk's with procedurally-generated courses and impeccable physics? Sign us up.
Descenders is out now on Early Access on Steam.
