Ruin

Ruin was a medieval fantasy Rust spin-off that a few people at Facepunch worked on in early 2018. It was abandoned after a few months.

I helped out with the initial project setup, pulling out all the Rust content that wasn’t needed, and getting a lot of the basics cleaned up.

I went on to re-work a lot of the NPC AI, adding various debug tools and visualizations borrowed from my work on Before. I also introduced some data-driving patterns into the NPC system, as previously everything was saved on prefabs which prevented any tweaks at runtime. I moved everything out to so-called “definition” assets, which allowed designers to tweak values in the editor while playing, that would save during play mode.

One thing I really enjoyed working on was the beginnings of a dynamic faction war system, which would see various factions of NPCs fighting for control of settlements around the world. I felt the system had a lot of potential to create interesting player interactions, as the plan was to allow players to gain a reputation with any given faction, and interact with the system by disrupting patrols, trade routes and getting involved in conflicts between factions.

While working on Ruin I took the opportunity to port the dynamic weather system I had built for Before to a standalone project that could be used in Ruin and other Facepunch games. This was a lot of fun to do, and started to have some really nice results.

I also wrote a system that helped with transitions between interior and exterior locations, fading out weather audio FX, blending between various post-processing effects and so on.

Working on Ruin was a lot of fun for me as I’m a complete sucker for anything fantasy, and it feels like there’s still a gap in the market for a really solid online medieval RPG of the kind of scale that Rust and other survival games operate on. Also, I got to take a lot of nice screenshots.

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