Meet Your Maker: Designing Destruction in Behaviour Interactive’s New Building-and-Raiding Game
Behaviour Interactive’s Meet Your Maker is a new first-person building-and-raiding game set in a dark post-apocalyptic future. In this dying world, players take on the role of the Custodian, servant to the Chimera: a living experiment created as a last resort to save life on Earth.
To help the Chimera evolve, you’ll need to provide it with pure genetic material, the world’s most precious remaining resource. But as you may have guessed, it won’t be easy to come by.
Gameplay revolves around the creation and infiltration of stand-alone levels called Outposts, as players seek to protect or steal genetic material from each other. Every single Outpost in the game has been built by players, for players, making user-generated content the driving force of the experience.
Considering the Outposts you’ll be building are massive maze-like structures teeming with deadly traps and guards, the possibilities are nearly endless.
Mind Games
Building in Meet Your Maker is focused on strategic, block-based design. The heart of an Outpost is its extractor cube, which fills canisters with the precious genetic material. To protect it, players will draw from a customizable toolbox of traps and guards as they create environments to lure, outwit, and eviscerate other players attempting to take what’s theirs.
“When it comes to building a successful Outpost, I would say that psychology is very important,” shares Meet Your Maker’s Senior Game Designer Inouk Samson. “You need to think strategically and put yourself in the mind of a raider, try to understand how they’ll act in various situations, and plan accordingly.”
“Good trap and guard combos are very important because a single trap or guard will rarely be efficient. There are literally hundreds of different combinations at your disposal without even factoring in block placement. How you put them together makes all the difference.”
Strategic Customization
But what does a good trap combo look like? Traps range from Corrosive Cubes filled with acid, to Bomb Ejectors, Incinerators, Impalers, Holocubes, and many more. Each trap can also be modded in a variety of ways to help guarantee maximum carnage for your diabolical designs.
Bombs can become bouncier. Detection ranges can be increased. Traps can be programmed to self-destruct. And every type of guard can be set on its own custom patrol path, drawn up by the builder themselves.
“I like to take the raider by surprise, which is why I like the Holocube,” explains Inouk. “It allows you to hide traps in plain sight. The next one is the Corrosive Cube because it allows projectiles to pass through it while appearing solid. Killing raiders in an area they were convinced was safe is truly satisfying.”
“I’m a fan of mid-sized rooms as I love using the Bomb Ejector,” shares Meet Your Maker’s Creative Director Ash Pannell. “This trap drops bombs that bounce all over the place. I use a range trap to pin down the raider at the entrance to the room and force them to use their grapple hook to fly across the space to escape. This inevitably triggers the Bomb Ejector I’ve hidden in the ceiling, and boom!”
Blueprints
The best part about building an Outpost in Meet Your Maker is the chance to create something deviously unique.
“My approach is always to start by creating a space I can play in,” shares Ash. “This could be a cave, a tower, or something more fantastic like a temple. You want to create a nice flow through your space to ensure the raider experiences your world.”
“Second is the fun part – fortification. Think strategically and add your traps and guards in cool combinations to really bring your Outpost to life. And finally, you decorate. You want to personalize your space, and have it mean something, but cosmetics also exist to help you mess with the mind of a raider. A trail of lights, something that catches your eye in a corner – you want them to get confused, lost, and distracted by just the right thing as you hit them with your traps.”
“You need to take your time and think what you want the raider to experience,” adds Inouk. “Maybe you’re not even looking to create the deadliest Outpost, but rather take the raider on a very specific journey. It’s all possible. Just decide on a direction and start building.”
Duality
Finally, whether you gravitate more towards building or raiding in Meet Your Maker, the best way to excel at one part of the game is to develop a deep understanding of the other.
“What I love about raiding is that everything I come across has actually been built by another player. And it’s all been crafted to kill me,” says Ash. “It’s also through raiding that you come to understand a lot of the subtleties of building as you deconstruct guard/trap combos to see how they managed to get you, and then implement those ideas in your own Outpost.”
“I believe that the best builders are also raiders,” finishes Inouk. “It’s all about discovering setups you may never have thought of on your own. Raiding is my best source of inspiration as a builder.”
Meet Your Maker will release in 2023 on Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S.
