Archive for July, 2010

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.