Tim Willits, Chief Creative Officer at Saber Interactive, recently shared how they came up with the idea for the shooter John Carpenter's Toxic Commando. As it turns out, SnowRunner played a role in it.
According to the developer, he was once watching a SnowRunner stream and the player got stuck in the mud at night:
It was night, and the player was stuck in the mud. And he said something like, "This is creepy. It's dark all around, and I'm stuck in the mud."
Although there's nothing scary in SnowRunner, this moment from the stream gave them an idea. Saber already had a success story with World War Z, and SnowRunner also had good sales — the idea arose to mix the two games into one:
Why not base it on both of these games? We'll create large locations that require transport, but we'll focus on a zombie shooter. Transport will be necessary for survival and movement among the infected. And they will throw themselves right at the car. And then the gameplay will be simply breathtaking.
As a result, John Carpenter's Toxic Commando combines the ideas of the zombie shooter World War Z and the off-road simulator MudRunner.
Lead Producer at Saber Interactive, Nikolai Yegorikhin, explained the vision:
Left 4 Dead was one of our main sources of inspiration, but it's an incredibly linear game. Everything happens indoors. From a level design perspective, the game consists of monotonous corridors. We wanted to move away from that. We knew the game would be session-based, and we didn't want a game session to last three hours or never end at all.
In the end, they settled on the fact that the design of the objectives and the size of the maps should be acceptable for game sessions of 15 to 40 minutes.
There will be an element of randomness on the maps:
The placement of objectives, items, and transport is quite random. Even encounters with enemies can happen in different places. But at the same time, there are also story moments in the game. For example, when passing a level with a church, you understand that an invasion of the infected is about to happen near it, because there is an important objective there and that's how it works.