Movement in Levers and Chests now "feels like 3D Prince of Persia."
In April, Notch, the creator of Minecraft, launched a new studio – Bitshift Entertainment – and shared that he's working on a new game (then a looter shooter). Since then, there have been a couple of updates that will slightly open the door to the developer's working process.
Apparently, this game, called Levers and Chests, is now more of a traditional hardcore roguelike. Notch has already implemented player collision, added jumping, and smoothed the way for custom key bindings.
"Platforming is somewhat fun, even in this totally randomly generated chaos of a test level. Sort of feels like a 3D Prince of Persia. I even added a long jump to cross one tile gaps (needs a better animation). Kind of tempted to spend some time seeing if free movement instead of tile based might actually be more fun again now," he shared on X/Twitter.
The developer also showed how he deals with ambient occlusion. He uses dithering (intentionally applied noise that creates the illusion of color depth) for the screen space ambient occlusion, does a normal/distance-aware blur to get rid of the noise, and then adds an artificial dither on top of it.
There isn't much more revealed, but you can enjoy some screenshots from X/Twitter:
This game looks far from conclusion, but we'll keep an eye on it. So join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Reddit, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.