The last time we wrote an article like this, we talked about how Ripout and its signature Pet Gun came to be (if you’ve missed that one, make sure to check it out!), and we promised more similar articles in the future. Well, consider that promise fulfilled!
Although we love our signature Pet Gun, that’s not what received the best feedback from the gaming community. Can you guess what did? The monster, of course!
If you’ve been following Ripout for a while, you’ve likely already seen some of our designs and are looking forward to hearing more about them. Well, that time has finally come! Let’s talk more about some of our designs.
P.S. Did you know that you can join our discord community and be the first to get a glimpse of our new designs? Join here!
Where the Inspiration Came From
As we briefly mentioned in our previous article, Ripout was greatly inspired by some classic old-school shooters. Naturally, our designs took after those games a lot too!
Many of you already guessed that some of our creations are reminiscent of monsters from titles like Doom, Dead Space, and Resident Evil. That is undeniably true! After all, most of our team grew up with those games and loves them to this day. So you can look at Ripout’s mutants as a homage to these iconic titles.
However, our goal was not to let our role models overshadow our creation. That is why we decided to take a slightly different approach.
Why Biomechanical Mutants
Doom has demons, Dead Space has Necromorphs (read space zombies), and Resident Evil has various types of infected. So what could we do to match these?
After some long and thorough deliberation, the answer became crystal-clear — a little bit of everything!
That is how we decided to go with the artificially generated space virus — the Cell — and how we drew our first biomechanical mutants.
The reasons behind our decision were simple:
- Although a virus that mutates its hosts is a relatively common horror trope, it leaves plenty of room for creativity in the design department.
- Playing around with living biotech opens up plenty of unique possibilities in both monster and environmental design, as viruses rarely (if ever) affect machines in the horror world.
This versatility in the most appealing aspects of a horror game — monster designs — is, in our opinion, essential to making a successful game.
Why Design Variety Is Crucial
There is one good reason we believe design variety is one of the most important factors of any successful horror game — it doesn’t only relate to the game’s visual appeal; it can also significantly affect the game’s pacing and gameplay!
What do we mean by that? Let us elaborate.
The more diverse the monster design palette of a game is, the more possibilities there are for different types of encounters and enemy difficulties. This variety is crucial for any action-packed horror game, and titles like Left for Dead are living proof of it. Juggling between big, heavily armored enemies or smaller, faster ones who try to swarm the player or many others is crucial to providing exciting and dynamic gameplay.
That is why Ripout’s monsters come in all shapes and sizes.
Types of Monsters in Ripout
If you’ve been following us on Twitter and other social media (follow us here if you haven’t), you’ve likely already noticed the variety in our monster designs. Let’s use our very own creations to illustrate our design philosophy better. Here are a few words about some of the monster types you’ve seen so far.
Living Biotech
Living biotech creatures like the little guy in the picture above are small, non-hostile mutants players and other mutants can capture and use to enhance their attacks or defense. Depending on the creature type, their abilities and buffs will vary.
We introduced these little critters to make the gameplay more dynamic and introduce plenty of room for strategizing against more powerful foes.
Dogs
If you’re a horror veteran, you’ve undoubtedly faced your fair share of canine enemies and hated them. That is the whole point of these mutant dogs!
These lightly-armored enemies are quick and agile and love hunting in packs. They are the perfect example of how to introduce variety in combat pacing.
Medium Enemies
The above is an example of one of our bread-and-butter creatures. These well-rounded mutants have good offensive capabilities and can take quite a few hits to defeat.
Every action-packed horror game should have one of these — they are never too challenging to beat but can still punish players if underestimated.
Heavy Enemies
These hulking monstrosities are like walking tanks; they are slow but can take a lot of punishment. When paired up with some hard-hitting living biotech, these will prove to be one of the biggest threats on the battlefield.
Can you spot and exploit their weak spot?
Humanoid Enemies
Aside from the designs we touched upon above, we’ve been working on various medium and heavy humanoid enemies lately. Unfortunately, we cannot go into further detail on them currently. However, trust us when we say — there are so many possibilities!
Want to check some of them out? Join our discord community and stay in the loop with Ripout’s development progress! We can’t wait to share more about the game and our designs as we finalize some of our latest works.
We hope you enjoyed this little look into our thought process behind our monster designs, and we hope to see you again soon with more news on Ripout!
Thank you for your support,
Pet Project Games Team
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