Hero image: Inside Dalton’s Dinos. Image: WDR Studios
Terrible Lizards — a first-person horror game about running from dinosaurs through a roadside attraction — is due out on 29 October, and its director has used a PlayStation Blog post to explain how it was put together.
John W. Gelardi, studio director and game director at WDR Studios, writes that the goal in founding the studio was simple: to “make the kind of games that we’d want to play”. He says he wanted to apply lessons from years of running a successful YouTube channel to games.
Movement first
The post describes the game as a 3D first-person platformer, with “parkour” used for its emphasis on moving through physical spaces. Gelardi also calls it an action/horror dinosaur game, and writes: “That balance between fear and fun is central to the game’s design philosophy.”
The moves listed are runs, jumps, slides, wall runs, bounces and ledge grabs, plus tools for changing each level. Rather than copy other parkour games, the team built its platforming on “the movement styles of popular first-person action shooters”.
Speed is the key decision. “In our game, you’re always going the maximum speed whenever you can move and jump: it’s fixed, which makes it predictable and rhythmic at the same time,” Gelardi writes. Momentum carries through jumps, and aerial control lets a player correct an over-jump mid-air — which, he says, allows for both a low and a high skill ceiling.
Dalton’s Dinos
The setting is the early 1990s. You play a college student on a Route 66 road trip whose car breaks down, and who goes looking for help inside a roadside attraction called Dalton’s Dinos.
Gelardi points to the indie mascot horror scene as the inspiration: “We’re very inspired by the current indie mascot horror niche, which takes familiar iconography and twists it into something new, as all horror does.” The team started from American nostalgia and interstate road trips, and landed on the attractions’ dinosaur statues and questionable fossil tours.
The title comes from the word itself. The post notes that dinosaur means “terrible lizard”, from the Greek deinos and saurus.
It is also a debut. “Our team is made up of first-time game developers, most of us being creators coming from the online space,” the post says.
The game’s Steam page lists WDR Studios as developer and Digital Pajamas and Behaviour Interactive as publishers, with the same 29 October date and no Australian price shown yet. It was also in our look at Xbox’s week ahead earlier this week.
Source: PlayStation.Blog – Terrible Lizards dev discusses twisting familiar dinosaur designs, out Oct 29, Steam (Australia) – Terrible Lizards