During the first two months during our internship at Free Lives. Richard Pieterse, Jarret Lunt and I developed an unreleased prototype titled “Ore Chasm” (not to be confused with FreeLives awesome Ludum Dare entry of the same name). The game is a Lego-Indiana Jones and Minecraft inspired dungeon crawler. The aim is to run around a level and collect as many items and coins as possible in a time limit. Once the time limit is reached the level begins to collapse and you need to fin the elevator to get to the next level. The Minecraft inspired procedural environment is destructible allowing players to uncover features like canyons, caves, waterfalls and cavernous lakes. The destructible nature is quickly highlighted through the use of different types of grenades, including; explosive, Terra-forming, water creating and grass growing.

I mostly focused on the Minecraft-like procedural generation of the environment and how it collapses/interacts with the monsters and playable characters. Richard focused on the parkour character animation system, controls and monster AI. Jarret was the sole creator of all the fantastic art and character animations. The game design was collectively constructed by everyone in the group and overseen by the mighty hand of Evan Greenwood.

Here is a cool video of a rough prototype during the development of the original Ore Chasm: