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Failsafe, a Video Game About Parkour

The idea of Failsafe, a video game about parkour, a young hero, and a robot was created after Daniel Lisi and his team created a start-up video game studio.  According to Lisi, Failsafe is a first-person parkour game about exploration, a forgotten civilization, secrets, and the relationship between its two main characters: Isra and The Robot.

The original story lines was something like this, "Isra as a Thai military brat who grew up under a UDUA (the Thai equivalent of the Navy Seals) soldier. She would eventually become one of the world’s greatest infiltrators, heading a global group of mercenary infiltrators that would steal anything for anyone with enough money". - Lisi. The concept took a new turn and became a Miyazaki-inspired exploration game that keeps the spirit of Isra and puts her in a fantastical world that we can invent from the ground up.

The folks of Failsafe recently answered a few questions about the game in an interview with madewith.unity about what sets the game apart. Here's their response:

Wall running. Our focus with the gameplay has been mainly on delivering fluidity of movement.

Our main character is small and agile, and we want the process of navigating her world to feel as smooth and seamless as possible. We decided early on that we wanted her to be able to run on walls.

It sounds simple enough, but there's a lot of factors to take into account to make something so unrealistic feel natural and intuitive. We experimented with a lot of different wall running mechanics and control schemes. For example, at the start we had a binary distinction between vertical wall running and horizontal wall running.

As for controls, the player originally had to hold the jump button to maintain a wall run, but we decided that it made more sense to maintain consistency in terms of how the player controls movement, so now the player holds forward input to maintain motion along the wall. Overall, our wall running system now gives the player a high degree of control without being overly complicated. It took a lot of iteration but the result is a mechanic that feels very intuitive and fun.

When asked about the inspirations for the game's story, Tanaka answered,

As huge fans of the Ghibli classics, all of our story development and art design are heavily inspired by works such as Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and Laputa: Castle in the Sky, to name a couple.

For the characters, we wanted to keep the simplicity and charm found in artists like Akira Toriyama, who designed the iconic characters from Dragon Ball series, as well as classic video games like Chrono Trigger.

Failsafe's creators have launched a Kickstarter campaign for the game. The programmers are refining how Isra runs vertically on walls while others are designing some new levels. Failsafe’s projected to be completed summer of 2016. If you're excited about the game, consider donating to their page.

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