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Living Liquid

We’re about half way through our first milestone as a full team and things are going great. Now that we’re ‘officially’ started, I thought I’d talk about how the idea and core of Vessel got started and where we want to take it.

I remember years ago before starting Vessel I would see amazing physics demos from companies like Havok – scenes of buildings collapsing, catapults launching rocks into crumbling walls and so on. It just looked so fun, I wanted to climb into that universe, but the vast majority of games back then that used these engines kept the physics as a side attraction. It was an effect used only for the visuals, for ragdolling dead bodies or scattering non-interactive bits after an explosion, etc. There wasn’t enough that dropped you into a physical universe, letting you truly experience it. It wasn’t connected to the whole of the game

That was the idea behind my work on Vessel and what got the project started, the idea of allowing the player to interact with a physically simulated world in a way never experienced in a game before. The engine began life as a hobby project, experimenting with physics engine techniques, and gradually grew into something that I believed could make a pretty deep and interesting game.

Still, even a deep physical simulation is not enough to make a whole game, and anytime you base a game on a new technique or algorithm there’s the danger of it becoming a gimmick, exploiting a shiny trinket instead of creating a fleshed out experience. One of our primary goals is to avoid that with Vessel, and to ensure that the technology meshes absolutely with the rest. The way to prevent something from becoming a gimmick is to make it meaningful, and that’s what we intend to do with the fluid mechanics of our game.

What does that all mean for Vessel? It means our story, technology, gameplay, and visuals are all connected and intertwined inseparably, they grow out of each other instead of one trumping the other. And from that, our centerpiece within this framework is the Fluro.

‘Fluros’ are what we’re calling the liquid creatures in our game, and everything revolves around them – the puzzles, the environment, the visuals, the story. They are the key element, and through them our game derives its fun and meaning.

So what are these things?

From a story perspective, a Fluro is a creation of the main character, they’re an invented automaton created in Arkwright’s lab for purposes of labor. They have abilities of no living thing (having forms of liquid) and can perform tasks impossible to humans. These things turned out to be immensely useful, and they’re now used across the world, and as the game starts you learn that somehow these Fluros are mutating – evolving, even – growing minds of their own and running amok. Both useful and dangerous, these Fluros are neither good-guy nor bad-guy, but a new form of life that must be dealt with.

From a tech perspective, a Fluro is an AI character that is formed out of simulated fluid. Since they are made of liquid, they can interact with our physically simulated world in ways impossible for non-liquid objects – passing through grates, melting and reforming, regrowing lost limbs, morphing shapes, chemical reactions with other fluid types, etc. All of the interactions take place as the result of natural rules in our physics simulation, there are no one-offs or pre-scripted character sequences.

From a visual perspective, a Fluro is a semi-living automaton, invented life created by the player that is moving beyond its built-in limitations, appearing mechanical yet increasingly organic. They have an amorphous, changeable shape, and we’re creating rendering techniques that really take advantage of their liquid nature.

From a gameplay perspective, they are the focus of your mechanics in the game. Given the right equipment, Arkwright can create these Fluros in any available fluid, with the type of fluid dictating how it will react with the world, and use them to solve puzzles and defeat enemies (enemies which are themselves Fluros).

By weaving all these elements together you amplify their effect, and tons of ideas fall out of their interaction.

Lot’s more to come.

Vessel signed with publisher Zoo, artists join team

The big-huge news today – Vessel has been signed with publisher Zoo Games and will be coming to console and PC!

This deal gives us the time and resources to make this game exactly how we envision it without taking any shortcuts, and partners us with Zoo Games who shown a real commitment to Indie innovation, first with their 2Bees contest and now IndiePub.  Check out the official press release here.

We’re incredibly excited to have this support, and as first order of business we’ll be bringing two long-overdue members officially into the Strange Loop Team:

Milenko Tunjic is our new art director and will be in charge of building the visuals of the unique universe of Vessel.  Milenko brings 19 years of professional artistic experience to the table across all forms, from traditional painting to 3d modeling to animation.

Mark Filippelli is new lead artist and will be designing and building the unique visual appearance of Vessel.  Mark has an extensive background at several large studios including EA, Brisbane.

With the combined talent of these two on board we will be seeing some incredible improvements on the visual side – the first steps are already done in fact, and Milenko will be making a blog post debuting them in the next few days, so stay tuned for that!

GDC 2010

Back from GDC this week, which had to be one of the best weeks ever.  So great to meet the rest of the indie community, and play all these awesome games I’ve been hearing about.  We got to demo Vessel to gamers, publishers, and other indies which was a lot of fun (and motivating to see the reaction it’s getting).  Nothing but game talk  all day, every day for a week, it’s a lot to absorb!   Now it’s time to take all the ideas I’ve collected and put them into the game.

Check out some pictures from our trip:

Can’t wait until next year…

Let there be multithreading

It’s been a fascinating odyssey/nightmare, but the Vessel engine is finally multi-threaded! What does this mean? Much larger volumes of fluid, much larger fluid creatures, and generally just a lot more splashing about.

Martin had already done his share with rendering being multithreaded ages ago, but it wasn’t until after the IGF/IGC builds that I decided to bite the bullet and pull apart the physics and gameplay code into separate threads. This caused a seemingly never-ending stream of issues because the gameplay and the physics are so tightly coupled in Vessel, but luckily they proved to be a finite number and it’s working well now. We’ve got three threads running pretty solidly, and the stage is set to easily break the physics thread up into even smaller individual jobs which can then be scheduled from a thread pool (which will really speed things up when we make our way to PS3/XBox and have a lot more hardware threads to play with).

This was something I wanted to get out of the way ASAP because it will have such a dramatic effect on the design of the game – the design of the Fluros, the types of puzzles we create, etc. It also represents a direction we want to push the game in generally – more about interactions with the simulations on a grand scale.

So just for fun I dropped a tsunami in the workshop level:

Vessel makes the Indie Game Challenge, needs votes!

We’ve been announced as a finalist in the Indie Game Challenge! Congrats to the other finalists, and click through to vote for Vessel.

Awards will be given out at the DICE summit in Las Vegas, with separate prizes for student and professional, and an audience award depending on votes.  See you in Vegas!  If we win it’s all going on Red…

IndieGames.com Interview

I did an interview with IndieGames.com the other day, give it a look for more information and some screenshots of Vessel.  I talk about our (still tenuous) plans for platform and release date, the story and design approach of our game, and the ideas behind our studio.  Check it out here:

http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2010/01/interview_strange_loop_games_j.html

Strange Loop Games is live!

Two exciting things today – first, our website and trailer for our first game Vessel are now live!  We still have a lot more work on the project before it’s ready to ship out, but we’d like to give a look to any curious internet citizens out there.

Second, Vessel has been nominated as a finalist in the IGF, in the category of ‘technical excellence’!  We’re extremely proud to be listed among so many amazing games, and looking forward to showing Vessel on the IGF floor.  Come out and play our game at GDC 2010…

We’ll be posting our development progress on this blog along with other random game-related minutiae as the mood strikes us, so stick around and drop us a comment.  Hello 2010, it’s going to be a busy year.

Music track is Jon Hopkins – Lost in Thought on Opalescent, licensed courtesy of Just Music www.justmusic.co.uk