User:ECDryere/Ring Runner

Ring Runner
Ring Runner: Flight of the Sages is an independent video game for the PC and Xbox that combines the game play of space-shooters with the customization and story-driven content of role-playing games. It is created by two brothers, Enrique C. Dryere and Paul Dryere, under the developer name of Triple-B-Titles.

Gameplay and features
Ring Runner: Flight of the Sages is a top down, 2.5D space-shooter blended with elements of an RPG. Its predecessors include Mythic Entertainment's Silent Death Online and Subspace Continuum. However, Ring Runner is typified by its wealth of unique skills, which include teleportation, time manipulation, stealth, turrets and drones, acrobatics, and grappling skills that can pull, grab, and throw opponents or debris.

The game is intended to be played with a gamepad that has dual analog joysticks. It features a Newtonian physics and flight model that roughly simulates actual movement and inertial preservation in space. The aim and direction of the ship are linked and controlled by the left stick in the default scheme. The right stick controls the activation of direction-based abilities called Archetype Abilities. Ships have four pools: energy, heat, shields, and hulls. Energy and heat are resources that are consumed in order to activate abilities. To defeat a ship, its shields and hulls must be entirely depleted. Shields regenerate quickly and protect the hulls, which repair slowly.

The driving concept behind Ring Runner is to create a game that permits for as much skill as a sport or musical instrument. The game runs at 60 frames per second. Contrary to most RPGs, attacks only miss if they don't physically hit the opponent and cannot cause "critical damage." This was done in order to minimize the effect of luck in competitive play.

Heat, Energy, and Payload
A player's resources are divided into two pools: heat and energy. Most weapons and abilities consume energy while producing heat, but some will consume heat. There are also abilities which require certain levels of heat or energy to activate, or are modified by a ship's current level of heat and energy. Depending on how a ship is equipped, heat can be either an asset or a negative that must be managed. The pools have a maximum and a minimum. Heat begins at its minimum and energy begins at its maximum. A second bar overlaps the first to display and overloaded and overheated state. When the second bar reaches its maximum, the ship suffers a negative effect; over-heating brings the ship to a complete stop and disables it for a short time, while over-loading disables the ship and damages it slightly. Energy can be reloaded at any time, but during this short process, the ship's shields are lowered, exposing its hull to attacks. Heat can be vented using a number of abilities, increasing speed, mobility, or providing some kind of attack. Payload is like energy on reserve. Payload abilities come with a prescribed number of ammunition. Each time they are used, one of these units of ammunition is consumed. The ammunition can be restocked at any time, but this takes up a great deal of energy. Some ships, particularly Arsenals, have alternative methods to restocking.

Story Driven Campaign
Its story-driven campaign offers about 20 hours of game play, taking players through a wide array of game types, including races, wave survival, stealth missions, base battles, tower-defense like missions, and mini games that mimic arcade classics like asteroids, brick out, and missile command. Most missions in the second half of the campaign can be challenged either alone or through local, two-player coop.

Multiplayer Modes
The three multiplayer modes, Base Battle, Wave Survival, and Deathmatch, are playable cooperatively and competitively. Players are able to host games and immediately launch, allowing other players to join matches in progress. The option to continue with another game of this type is presented to all players at the end of each match. The AI is able to assume control of player ships when they drop, minimizing interruptions to game play.

Just as in the campaign, players earn plex (money) through their victories in multiplayer and unlock new random shops, which can offer the opportunity to buy new items and ships.

Base Battle: The objective is to destroy the opposing team's base before they destroy yours. Bases are defeated by destroying their central hubs. The hub can be attacked at any point, but its defenses are strengthened by each of the shield generators on the base's arms. Taking out these generators first will render the hub more vulnerable to attack. At the beginning of each match, several utility structures (the number depends on the size of the base) are randomly selected. Both bases will have the same utility structures, and each of these structures grants its own unique bonus, such as the drone bay, which spawns an AI-controlled Rank 4 ship Respawning occurs on a timer. Each time a ship is defeated, its team's spawn timer increases until it reaches a maximum. This timer can also be affected by certain utility structures.

Wave Survival: Players must survive waves of attacks that become progressively harder. There is a brief respite between each attack, but there is no end to the waves. The initial difficulty is adjustable. Amongst the multiplayer modes, this is the only mode that is exclusively cooperative.

Deathmatch: This mode offers traditional team versus team game play. At the end of the match, the team with the most kills is the winner.

Power Ups
Power ups can appear after defeating ships, the higher the rank the better the chance. They can also come from destroying objects like space trash, asteroids, and containers. There are five kinds of power ups which can bolster a ship's offense or defense and reduce the cool down period between successive activations of abilities. These buffs remain in effect for the duration of the match so long as the ship is not destroyed. Other power ups can restore a ship's payload and energy while reducing their heat or return their shields and hulls to maximum.

Equipment and Abilities
Ring Runner offers over 300 unique abilities, some active and some passive. Abilities are bound to pieces of equipment, which can be loaded into hulls that have the corresponding node type. The 65 hulls have different configurations of nodes, yielding unique templates for customization. Each node has an amount of slots, which dictates how many pieces of equipment of that time can be loaded into it. However, some equipment pieces may take up more than one slot.

Archetypes
The 65 playable ships are divided into five archetypes: rogues, arsenals, fighters, grapplers, and casters. Each archetype has 3 unique node types. However, the majority of Rank 5 hulls are hybrids, combining nodes from more than one archetype. Each archetype also has its own unique veterancy node, which grants players bonuses the longer they live and the more opponents they defeat. A hull's veterancy node is determined by their primary archetype, and no hull has more than one kind of veterancy node.

Arsenals
Aresnals are heavy on firepower and defensive abilities, but have less mobility than other archetypes. They are also typically the largest and heaviest ships, making them easier to hit, but harder to push around. They can deploy turrets, lay mines, fire swarms of rockets, and call down cruiser strikes. Their three unique node types are: Pivot Platform, Advanced Weapons Bay, and Heavy Weapon's Platform.

Casters
Casters are well balanced. They have plenty of mobility, defensive capacities, and their weaponry is typically area of effect. But their abilities to manipulate the force of gravity and time are their defining feature. They can summon comets, teleport great distances, and travel small distances backwards in time. In traditional RPG terms, Casters can be compared to wizards. They consume a great deal of energy, but they typically have more power cores than other archetypes. Their three unique node types are: Mass Emitter, Caster Drive, and Dimensional Array.

Fighters
Fighters are the fastest and most maneuverable archetype. They can perform acrobatics like barrel rolls and Immelmann turns to avoid incoming fire or chase down opponents. Their weaponry consists mostly of precise lasers. The tremendous amount of heat they generate can be turned into a variety of offensive abilities ranging from bombs to plasma trails. Although Fighters excel at the management of heat and energy, their shields are the weakest in the game.

Their three unique node types are: Agile Drive, Fixed Cannon, and Advanced Heatsink.

Grapplers
Grapplers introduce an element of melee combat. They are very resilient and can pull themselves towards opponents or drag enemies to them. Their weaponry consists mostly of repurposed mining hardware like drills and lasers or cargo lasers. As far as mobility is concerned, they are second only to Fighters.

Their three unique node types are: Gravmag Plating, Mining Rig, and Kinetic Drive.

Rogues
Rogues excel at stealth and subterfuge. Although their cloaking device makes them hard to spot, it's their wealth of decoy abilities that makes them hard to pin down in combat. Rogues have the ability to trade places with their holographic projections, which makes them useful regardless of whether or not they successfully fool opponents. Their weaponry is based on building up charges on a target called "gemini beacons." These beacons can be consumed to unleash powerful attacks and sabotage abilities. Gemini beacons can be delivered through a number of methods such as lasers, rockets, and strings of mines.

Their three unique node types are: Gemini Relay, Subterfuge System, and Cloak.

Procedural Background Generation and AI
The backgrounds are procedurally generated and feature planets of all kinds, moons, stars, and nebulae. The star systems created function as they would in reality, with moons orbiting their planets, and the planets orbiting their star. This organization allows for phenomenon such as naturally occurring eclipses. The possible backgrounds total in the billions. Artificial-Intelligence-controlled ships can utilize any combination of equipment and abilities that a human player can. This creates nearly endless potential configurations of enemy ships. It also allows the AI to immediately take over the piloting of a ship if one of the players drops out of a multiplayer match, minimizing interruption to game play.

Plot and Novel
In the interest of universal peace, The Consortium of the Inner Rings (CIR) decreed that all Sages are outlaws. They reasoned that a man who can blink a world out of existence with a thought cannot be bound by its laws. And so the Sages find themselves chased to the outer rims of the known universe, hunted by the CIR's version of their own, the Extinguishers. The casualties of the resulting war were measured in species and solar systems. This conflict is known as The Extinguishing.

Players are put into the role of a Sage that has just awoken from brain surgery to find that the space station they're in is under attack. They have absolutely no recollection of their lives before this point, but the voice of Nero, their newly acquired neuro-HUD, urges them onward. Nero acts as a guide, referential resource, and sometimes, annoyance, as the player begins to discover the universe. They quickly become embroiled in a war between two trash moguls in The Litter Glitter galaxy and make a tidy profit by playing both sides. A mysterious Sage approaches the player and teaches them about the secrets of the Subrostrum, a place beneath atoms. At this level of magnification, the force of will is stronger than natural forces, and this is the source of a Sage's powers. Players must see out the end of the trash war before acquiring a ship with an anchor drive, which allows for universal travel.

By this point, the player has learned that they are not human, but they don't know what they are. Their quest to discover their origins will take them around the universe. Along the way, they'll encounter a colorful cast of characters and a variety of unexpected locations, including space trailer parks, interstellar gladiatorial arenas, questionable fast food restaurants, and asteroids archipelagos, some inhabited with their own atmospheres.

The gender of the player character is never addressed or defined.

The universe of Ring Runner is based on a eponymous Sci Fi novel, written by Enrique C. Dryere. It takes place over three centuries after the events of the game and offers closure to the story of the game's protagonist. The book is written with the same blend of humor, action, and Science Fiction as the game.

Development
The development of Ring Runner: Flight of the Sages began as a learning experience for brothers, Enrique Coindreau Dryere and Paul Dryere in 2008. They were studying together at The University of Texas at Dallas and had no prior experience in the video game industry. After just a few months of development, their project won a local award, and they decided to see how far they could take it. The game's original inspiration is Mythic Entertainment's since defunct game, Silent Death Online. The brothers' goal was to create a modernization of SDO, offering a wider array of game play option and depth of customization.

When they started out, Enrique had never composed a song, or made a sound effect. He'd only written a few short stories and made a couple of 3D models in class. Paul had only coded a few basic programs in his CS courses and a couple of small Flash games in a class they took together. Ring Runner has been the product of five years of hard work. Along the way, James K. Weaver, Enrique's roommate from The University of Texas, helped to create the hangar environment. Since then, he's acted as one of the game's testers.

In 2011, Enrique met Courtney Whitehead, an artist from Dallas, Texas. She has contributed by creating some of Ring Runner's more cartoon-like art assets as well as providing additional testing. Enrique and Courtney are engaged and scheduled to be married shortly after the game's release.