Witness Fully Destructible, Procedurally Generated 3D Dungeons In ‘Io’
The developers of the roguelike 3D platformer, Io, are showcasing early footage of their game’s impressive mechanics which allow for “fully destructible and editable procedurally generated voxel levels”.
Three Swedish students have developed a game based around an adapted engine based off of Unity 3D which they say is “capabable of handling polygon rendered, fully destructible 3D voxel environments.” You may not have thought much of that on words alone, but the newly released first footage of this mechanic in the game which sees the game’s levels load as you move around them is undoubtedly smart.
The idea of procedurally generated levels has been around since the eighties and implemented in many games since then, but Io remains impressive for its one-the-fly 3D level creation as the player moves around; something that has not really been created quite as effectively before. To top it off, this environment is completely destructible and editable as soon as it is created as it is based in a voxel engine.
The breakthrough with this tech came back in August when the developers managed to separate the geometry generation from voxel data from the main game logic entirely and parallellized it into several separate threads. “This is good because it makes things go super fast and super smooth (them multi-core CPUs will be put to some good use)” they said on their blog.
The developers say that players of Io will have to take advantage of this impressive mechanic when playing the game but they do not go into details. They do say that enemies will be added to the game soon and you can also see the basics of the item/inventory system and the new player model, albeit stuck in a looping slow motion run animation for now.
Io is intended to be a highly replayable, easy-to-learn but hard to master roguelike in the spirit of Spelunky of all things. It is set in a surrealistic alien world and will feature a dynamic environment, intelligent monster AI and a versatile item system.
More information on Io can be obtained from the developer’s official blog.
