Risk of Rain 2 Announced, Still Very Early in Development

Hopoo Games have announced Risk of Rain 2, the sequel to their popular roguelite platformer, completely out of the blue. A new entry on their blog details what they have so far, shows off a couple of flashy gifs and explains their hopes and wishes for the game. Sadly, the game still has a long way to go before it’s completed.

According to the devblog, they’ve been working on it for six months now, and it’s their first 3D game. Like, completely 3D. I’m not really sure how well the bullet hell of Risk of Rain will translate to 3D, but the devs are pretty confident, claiming it allows for “deeper design spaces” and “more possibilities for cool gameplay”. Not only that, but they say the concept plays even better in 3D.

The visual noise is what worries me. The first game was busy as hell at times, but it was manageable. Making it 3D makes it kinda hard to differentiate the XP orbs from enemy fire from your fire from the actual enemies themselves, kind of. Add glowing auras to that, and you’ve got a hard-to-read mess taking up most of your screen.

For now, they’ve published a couple of gifs from the game, but as it’s still early days, pretty much everything is subject to change – from the art style and the assets, to the design choices and underlying systems. They’re going to dedicate the next couple of posts to the mechanics already in place, so if you’re into that kind of thing, you should consider following their blog closely.

There are more questions than answers at this point, but that’s usually how these things go. We’ll just have to keep a steady eye on the game for ourselves, and hope future blog posts are more informative than this one.