Game lore is a very broad concept; every studio and every team on every individual project works with it differently, and how it works frequently depends on what comes first—the lore or the game.

In our case, the lore has been developed from scratch along with the game. That's why our lore is created not by just one writer but a whole team of game designers, script writers, publishers, and art designers. It's like we're assembling a Rubik's Cube together, and the cube's faces revolve around the core—the gameplay.

Gameplay and Setting

Suppose the game is launched by a new player. What will this player see?

An 8-meter steel soldier with razors on his shoulder attacking a 6-meter tall, 48-ton iron bear and occasionally destroying Drones that get caught in the crossfire (not to mention houses, cars, gas stations, and other objects around). And all this happens on an abandoned Earth with no trace of people.

The player may have a number of questions. What is happening or has happened? Where are the people? What year is this? Who is this soldier, and why is there a mechanical bear? Behind every object on the screen, there's a solution for a specific problem, and these solutions shape the game setting.

How Hunters Appear

Initially, we wanted to make a shooter with powerful, resilient characters. There aren't so many things in the world that can endure heavy damage: some machines, buildings, and heavily armored vehicles. Looking through the possible options, we eventually came up with large robots, and we initially used the term "mechs" to describe them.

We liked everything about the idea except for the very concept of "mechs." A mech is lifeless and impersonal. We knew, even during our Playtests, that our team wanted characters that were animated and of human origin.

But how could we implement that? Perhaps the mechs could be driven by pilots? Ok, so would the pilot be inside or outside? If inside, then the player is the pilot, not the mech, and the mech turns out to be deprived of life again. If the pilot is outside and within something like a cloud center, connecting via a machine (like in "The Matrix" movie), then it's not even clear who the player should associate themselves with. We understood that the personality should be embodied in the character we see on the screen, the one we actually play as. We needed a character with their own thoughts, experience, and emotions, but we didn't know at that moment how to explain this and how to make it possible within the framework of the game's lore.

Character Scale

At the same time, we were working on the aspects of scale and location. We wanted the player to feel like a huge 8-meter-tall robot. As a result, we gave up on battles in "galaxies far, far away" and returned the mechs to the Earth—an environment where players would be familiar with the sizes of everything they could see in the game: cars, buildings, bridges... These objects surround the player in everyday life, and the player can feel the characters' scale amid them.

Where Did the People Go?

Once we brought the setting back to Earth, a new question arose: What should we do with the Earth's inhabitants—its people? Our initial intent was to create a game featuring opponents of equal size, and humans didn't fit into our concept. Consequently, the gameplay doesn't involve humans. So, something must have scared people so much that they hid underground or even fled the planet. We intentionally avoided scenarios that involved killing everything and everyone. After all, there had to be someone to continue building, updating, and repairing the mechs.

Bearing this in mind, we came up with Starfall. It was an unknown substance that had originated from a meteoric cloud and spread all over the planet. Exposure to Starfall accelerated aging, which forced people to seek refuge from it. Then we went further; some people turned out to have an immunity to the material's negative effects… And what if people with this immunity could, under certain conditions, merge with Starfall and imbue a mech with their personality, memories... everything that made them, them, essentially becoming one with it?

This is how Hunters appeared. Similarly, literally everything that the player sees in the game arose from this concept. The Survivors' War, Corporation, and rewards—they all are solutions for specific problems we were solving until all the "Rubik's Cube faces" were in their proper places.

Roadmap

The roadmap represents a brief overview of the development of events in the universe that has brought us to the point where the game starts.

Our entry point is as follows:

"Hunters are 8-meter-tall machines with character remnants of a life that was given for them to become conscious. They fight in the League of Steel on Earth, which is mired in oblivion under a layer of Starfall—a mysterious substance which is simultaneously a threat to all life and the most valuable asset in the new world."

In our roadmap, we specify the important events that shaped this reality. It's here perhaps that we address the history of humanity and up-to-date news most often. We introduce an action and then imagine how the real world would react to it.

We make sure that a sense of truth is maintained. We could plot out that four alien races will arrive tomorrow, and the Earth will turn into an arena for combat games the day after, but this is very unlikely. The world is not that agile. It changes slowly and adapts to new circumstances reluctantly.

History has already seen numerous cases when meteoric clouds, asteroids, and comets that could destroy all life on the Earth were detected. There have also been countless doomsday prophecies. So, we had enough resources to pick something for our roadmap—from conspiracy theories to riots and rebellions, from government bunkers and attempts of corporations to save their assets to people fighting for their lives with any means available. 

All this has happened before, and the COVID-19 pandemic is just the most recent example. We've learned quite a lot from how people interacted with each other in extreme situations.

Characters and Events

In geometry, we need two points to draw a line. In our case, these points—the desired Hunter image and Hunter's place in the gameplay—are set through cooperation between numerous different departments.

Plot webs start spinning at this stage. We have a table of relationships between the characters—who did what to whom and what that led to. Even if they belong to the same faction, Hunters can dislike each other and pursue their own interests.

The purpose and motives for participation in the Survivors' War are a separate matter. We want every Hunter to be driven by their personal purpose and for the player to know the history and motivation of each particular Hunter when choosing one. Heartbreaker plays to cement and grow her power, while Razorside fights for the rebels that believe in him.

Events in the universe are a separate story. Internally, we refer to them as "minor" or "major." Minor events happened in a character's life and directly influenced the character's history and relationships with some of the other Hunters: Razorside making sacrifices for his people, Trenchwalker conducting shady experiments. All these events not only fill the universe with life and history but also provide us with an opportunity to create something special in the game: a skin, event, or reward.

Major events affect the universe in general, which means they affect all Hunters. The first wave of the meteoric cloud, discovery of Starfall, confrontation between the Mining Guild and the Corporations, the start of the survivors' war—all these are major events in the universe that shaped Hunters and our attitudes to them.

There were also certain major events that happened after the survivors' war began. We've rarely spoken of them to date, but we've already saved up a massive list of such events. They will be the game's driving force after the release and will be embodied in season updates, events, skins, and merchandise for players.

While working on the game from the lore perspective, we aim to create a unique atmospheric world that will elicit a wide range of emotions from our players. Many interesting challenges lie ahead. Follow the project development to learn fascinating details about the Hunters' universe. See you in the game!