Still Building
Because obviously if you’re making a game, use a 20-plus-year-old engine
The Build engine, apparently, cannot be killed by conventional means. While the technology behind it is objectively outdated and has been outclassed by plenty of other engines the fact is, in 2018, there’s a new game using the Build engine. Ion Maiden is actually based on Eduke32, a source port of the original Build, but for all intents and purposes this is a brand-new, commercial release using a 22-year-old engine.
“The original idea was to make a companion game for Bombshell [a top-down shooter released in 2016] that would explain the main character’s backstory,” Scott Miller explains, “But as the project went along we saw it as something that could stand on its own and deserved more development time and effort. We came to the realisation that the Build engine can still be the foundation for a really fun game.”
There are limitations to factor in, but decades of experience with Build, knowing what it’s capable of – and what its limitations are – means the team at Voidpoint is working from an advantageous position, and it shows. The preview episode (think shareware for the Steam generation, meaning you have to pay for it) shows an accomplished, confident FPS full of the kind of creativity we all love from games of the engine’s past.
“We had to live within the engine’s core features and abilities,” Scott admits, “Build was designed as a single-player and deathmatch engine, so these are the modes we’re sticking with. If there’s a chance to include co-op, we’ll do that, but that mode hasn’t been nailed down and tested yet. “With that in mind it’s little surprise the game is single-player only. But again, that’s a feature harking back to the simpler Nineties, when not everything had to be online.
Happily, Scott and the 3D Realms team aren’t set on leaving it with Ion Maiden – there are already plans afoot for more games using Build, or at least the modernised version of the classic engine. “We are diligently looking into making at least a few more Build engine games,” he says, “But it’s important to note that the Build engine has been significantly beefed up since the Nineties, largely by Voidpoint. They know the engine better than anyone in the world, and have added several key features that upgrade it over the Nineties version of Build, such as larger map sizes, seamlessly connected levels, and far better lighting.”
Ion Maiden might look like it’s jumped through a time portal from the Nineties, but if you tried to get it running on a Pentium MMX desktop of the era, you would fail. It might use the base of the older tech, but this is a modern game in a lot of ways – and one that has definite appeal to fans of the Build era.