Destiny Dev Making a PS4/PC Game in His Spare Time

Ryan Juckett is a busy man. During the days, he works at Bungie as a lead sandbox engineer on Destiny, a position he's held for nearly five years. On nights and weekends, Juckett spends his time on the 1-4 player shooter (of sorts) Inversus, a "passion project" that this week was announced for PlayStation 4.

Juckett describes Inversus as a "mind-bending action-strategy" game. The twist is that your movement is limited to sides of a black and white grid; every time you shoot, the tile color changes. To use Juckett's phrase, one player's paths are the other's walls. Thus, the strategy element.

The overall goal is to shoot your enemies to take them down, which is easier if you can trap them first. As you can see in the trailer above, the action can get a bit crazy with four players.

Juckett went on to say Inversus' novelty might wear off if there wasn't a variety of maps to play. Instead of creating randomized maps, Juckett wanted each to have its own "specific, discrete purpose." He showed off three of these in a post on the PlayStation Blog, one of which is called Alley (pictured below).

On this map, there are items called "hyper-shot pickups" placed along an alley. A good strategy is to hold the alley, because even if you didn't have the special items, it's a smart place to be to control your opponent's movement, Juckett said.

Gallery

You can see the other two maps, Bomber and Pipes, in the image gallery above while more details about them are on the PlayStation Blog. It's unclear how many maps are included with Inversus, but Juckett said these three represent just a "small subset" of what will be available when the game arrives.

Inversus also has a single-player Arcade mode that challenges players to rack up the highest score possible as they face off against AI-controlled enemies. Scores can then be posted to a leaderboard.

Juckett further explained that Inversus was built from the ground up. He didn't use a licensed game engine and designed the sound effects himself. It's not completely his own work, however, as he enlisted the help of German musician Lyvo for the game's soundtrack.

Inversus launches this spring on PS4, as well as PC, which the game was already confirmed for.

In Destiny news, just this week, Activision announced that a "large" Destiny expansion is coming this year while a Destiny sequel will release in 2017.