Heya folks. I want to do regular tidbits about various aspects of Red Eclipse to document development of the game over its history. I’m just a player more so than anything else and I’ve come to appreciate decisions that Quin (project lead) and co. have made over the years which has led to my long-lasting (probably unhealthy) love affair with the project. Hope you enjoy! ~Honno

Whilst you can describe Red Eclipse as a ‘Quake-like’, a work heavily influenced by the Unreal Tournament/Quake fold, RE is actually has stark contrasts to the status quo of these competitive arena shooters. The design choices made for RE revolve around giving players the same rewarding feedback for good aim, fast reaction times and having a sense of movement like the classics, but works toward making the experience intuitive for any level of gamer to grasp— making everything accessible for newcomers, and not only cater to seasoned veterans of the genre, is one of our main goals.

Possibly the most prominent feature which establishes this is RE’s impulse system. Every player has energy to be used for essentially parkour tricks costing ‘impulse’ that slowly regenerates over time. Impulse is vital for combat as it allows you to quickly dodge enemy fire and travel quickly across a map. The skill is in carefully managing your supply to be most effective. A happenstance for having so many moves implemented is the creation of a competitive game in its own right— the ‘race’ mode involving player competing to get a lower time then the rest to complete a lap.

Why impulse is important from a casual player’s point of view however is how it replaces bunny hopping. For those unfamiliar, bunny hopping/bhopping essentially is the player’s manipulation of movement to gain speed, such as jumping sidewards as the strafe speed was coded to be faster than the forward movement, which is featured in most oldschool arena shooters. Bhop was first something earlier gamers found out to abuse to help them against other players, later becoming an adopted mechanic which definitely made great strides in creating a ‘hardcore’ experience where a skill could be learnt to mastery which helped your gameplay (also a lot of fun). Here’s a good retrospective video on the subject.

However, this mechanic makes no intuitive sense for a first-timer. Long-term players of arena shooters who are proficient in bhopping likely got pummeled in their early matches of their respective games due to fast movements other players had, which urged them to go out and practice themselves. The sentiment is that they only got to enjoy the game at a higher level by first learning strange mechanics such as the bhop, probably reading up wiki guides, watching videos or tiring over practice maps. No one is saying learning to bhop is unrewarding — there are good parallels with a sport experience in the process — but Red Eclipse has no bhopping as it can stop games from being enjoyed more casually.

And so the strafe speed is smaller than the forward speed and the ‘gravity’ in the game makes jumping from place to place slower than running, to make the impulse system take precedent. Maybe we got lucky, but what came about from little nitpicks over old favourites ended up leading to what we think is a really fun and simple game mechanic.

If you’re interested in learning more about the impulse system, you can check out this page on our wiki. A quick skim through and little play around with in-game will have you set, but you can always try race maps as well to become more proficient (it’s also quite enjoyable). In particular there’s the ‘Tuto’ map that explains advance techniques well which you can download from the forums.

Have fun, and if you have any questions then please respond in the comments.