Spire is an upcoming adventure game about finding the bounds in a boundless world.
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This game will most likely never see the light of day (outside of the few brief glimpses we’ve gotten from dev posts). All of the team seems to have moved on from the project. It actually crushes my heart to see so much potential for a great game, especially considering that the team working on it was Hitbox Team. It’s a frustrating tale of a canceled project that was born too early, and never fully bloomed.
For those who don’t know what Spire is/was, it’s a procedurally generated FPS with platforming elements. If you want more details about the project, you can head over to hitboxteam.com. It started development around 2012 and continued until at least 2017, where the last blog posts can be found on Hitbox Team’s website. Clearly a lot of work went into the game, they’ve even talked before about how Unity just couldn’t do stuff that they wanted so they had to build new tools to accomplish some of their design aspirations (a lighting engine, lots of pathfinding stuff, etc.)
The idea behind the game is that you climb a spire with presumably multiple floors. Each would be procedurally generated, with one of the most notable features being that it wasn’t really based on a seed. Player data would be stored on a chart of sorts and the generation would pull data from that to create a natural ebb and flow for the climb. One of the games developers, Lexie Dostal, talked in an interview about how they were trying to create compelling player narratives with this system, really interesting stuff. That mixed with the high emphasis on strong mechanics that (the best) Roguelikes have seemed like a fertile ground for interesting moments.
It kinda sounds like my dream game tbh. Dustforce and Spelunky are two of my favorite games, and it seemed like Spire was taking the best parts of each and putting it into an FPS. If I could choose one game to know everything about, it would undoubtedly be Spire. I still hope that one day they can finish it or release it in any other form, but for now, Spire will live rent-free in the back of my mind.
For those who don’t know what Spire is/was, it’s a procedurally generated FPS with platforming elements. If you want more details about the project, you can head over to hitboxteam.com. It started development around 2012 and continued until at least 2017, where the last blog posts can be found on Hitbox Team’s website. Clearly a lot of work went into the game, they’ve even talked before about how Unity just couldn’t do stuff that they wanted so they had to build new tools to accomplish some of their design aspirations (a lighting engine, lots of pathfinding stuff, etc.)
The idea behind the game is that you climb a spire with presumably multiple floors. Each would be procedurally generated, with one of the most notable features being that it wasn’t really based on a seed. Player data would be stored on a chart of sorts and the generation would pull data from that to create a natural ebb and flow for the climb. One of the games developers, Lexie Dostal, talked in an interview about how they were trying to create compelling player narratives with this system, really interesting stuff. That mixed with the high emphasis on strong mechanics that (the best) Roguelikes have seemed like a fertile ground for interesting moments.
It kinda sounds like my dream game tbh. Dustforce and Spelunky are two of my favorite games, and it seemed like Spire was taking the best parts of each and putting it into an FPS. If I could choose one game to know everything about, it would undoubtedly be Spire. I still hope that one day they can finish it or release it in any other form, but for now, Spire will live rent-free in the back of my mind.