Insurmountable Windows game

Insurmountable

ByteRockers' Games | Released Apr 29, 2021

Death always climbs with you

Insurmountable is an adventure roguelike with permadeath, in which the player has to overcome huge mountains. Thanks to the procedurally created environment, no two climbs are the same. Make sure that your climber stays alive by always making sure that your vital values don't get into the critical range. This task is made more difficult by a dynamic weather system, day/night changes and a multitude of randomly generated events, where you never know in advance how they will end. Your decisions matter....every single one. Because anyone could be your last.

Choose one of three characters with different skills and background stories and start by climbing the first mountain. Search crates, caves and ancient ruins for equipment from past adventurers. You'll need it, because even the first mountain will demand everything from you. But don't worry. As time goes by, you'll become stronger and stronger. Decide freely in a sophisticated skill system, which strengths should have your*s climber*in.

In the course of each of the three mysterious stories, you will meet dangerous animals, overcome deadly abysses, encounter sinister and well-meaning characters, who do not always have to be human. Here, too, each of your decisions decides the following events.

Four mountains have to be conquered at the end. One higher and deadlier than the previous one. Divide your forces and your equipment correctly, because you don't have a second attempt and you can forget about learning a route. In Insurmountable you have to cope with unknown dangers, react spontaneously to unpredictable events and realize in the end that, as in life, you can't always know the consequences of your decisions, but you have to cope with them anyway and in the end, it often turns out differently than you thought.

Face the challenge of ever new and changing dangers, face snowstorms and the sheer force of nature, always keep your eyes on the summit and overcome the insurmountable.

no two climbs are alike
procedurally generated mountains
dynamic world with different weather effects
hundreds of events with ever-changing outcomes
strategic gameplay in path finding, stat and equipment management
3 characters with different abilities

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The awesomeness of randomness | Insurmountable DEVBLOG #13

Jan 10 2022 News

Happy New Year. I hope you had a good start into the new year.

This is our first Dev Blog in 2022, today we focus on the Random Map Generation.

Let’s get into it!

The random map generation in Insurmountable so far has been that the mountains the player moves on are partly handcrafted and partly randomly generated.

First, let's look at the handcrafted mountains.

Handcrafted Mountains are made of a chain of different areas. In the picture above you can see the structure of a mountain. The highlighted sector is an area.Small decoration objects and bigger chunks are randomly generated at every game start.But these chunks have also small handcrafted areas within the bigger areas like in these two pictures.

The advantage of these handcrafted mountains is simple: We can guide the player as we want and have much more control over the level design without losing the ability of random generation.

Disadvantage is the amount of work to create all the areas and different chunks, and for a small team like us it is not possible to create enough content in a short time. They have different gameplay, a more epic look and a lot of love and details inside.

Now let’s talk about the random mountains. The experience from creating handcrafted mountains came in handy when switching to complete randomness. With this type of generation, we can create an almost endless number of mountains. The difference to the handcrafted mountains and the combination of smaller random areas are that we now use a whole map for each level, which is created only by parameters and will change with every build. These two Pictures are the same mountain which built two times differently.

We still use chunks, but instead of building a lot of different ones, we now use a small amount which also have randomness in height and surface settings.

We create the different values for the height, shape, object distribution, surface distribution and the event placing by using a set of noise maps.

Those maps are new generated, when a new Map is loaded. The values for each noise map can be set by the mission type, so the mission itself can set the difficulty for each map.

(Surface)

(Roughness)

(Blocker decoration)

(POI distribution)

But this comes with some disadvantages. The Players guidance us now reduced. It is less obvious where is the best way to the top. It can happen that an initially good path to the top turns out to be a dead end. Random mountains are more challenging than the handcrafted ones. At the end of the game, it is not that much a problem but in the early stages, we want a smooth increase of the difficulty.

If you want to support us and be part of the community feel free to follow us on Twitter or join our Discord. There you can also send us your ideas, suggestions and wishes for the game or discuss these ideas with the other members.

We hope you can overcome the insurmountable in your life. Have a nice day!