We’ve had a few requests on our Twitter for desktop backgrounds, take your pick:

Also a new announcement and video about the music is coming soon, in the next day or two hopefully!

And now back to polishing.

First big news: Vessel will be available on PC on March 1st! Download on Steam and here at StrangeLoopGames.com. Console releases are coming soon as well. That is just over a month away, which blows my mind a little.

Second big news: Two new videos! This one is the first in a series of Invention Reports, this one detailing the Fluros:

The next video is a first-look, developer walk-through. Watch this one for a detailed look at the mechanics of our game:

Third big news: New website! But you already knew that one since you’re here We went for a look that matches the game, with parallax in the background. We’re pretty happy with it, but there’s still a few quirks we need to work out so bear with us if you see something amiss in the layouts, it will be fixed soon.

Things are starting to get interesting…
-JohnK

http://www.kotaku.com.au/2011/11/from-brisbane-to-seattle-a-strange-loop-game/

Half our team is in Australia, where Martin and I used to live.  Usually this would be a burden on a team but with us it has become an advantage,with them in separate time zones they are the ‘night shift’ relative to our Seattle location and vice-versa.

Tree house video: The main character Arkwright invented these liquid machines (Fluros), here he’s encountered a new Fluro evolution that’s merged itself with this tree and he’s ‘sampling’ it with that machine to gain its abilities. He uses the blue goo to lure it into position under the needle.  This video shows the new ‘Drinker’ Fluro which hasn’t yet been shown.

Engine video: In this video Arkwright is collecting red and blue goo that grows from the tree, and using that happen when they combine to power an engine.  This video shows off a couple of new fluid types that we hadn’t shown until now.

We also stopped by Gamespot while we were down there and were on their web show ‘On the Spot’, showing our demo from Pax.  It was fun talking to Chris and meeting the Gamespot guys, if a little terrifying that we were doing a live demo of an alpha build (everything went swimmingly though). Check it out here:

http://www.gamespot.com/shows/on-the-spot/index.html?event=on_the_spot20110922

We’re also working on a series of short videos now that will show the main mechanics of the game in detail, stay tuned for that!

Leonard Paul has a fifteen year history in composing, sound design and coding for games working for companies such as Electronic Arts, Backbone Entertainment, Radical Entertainment, moderngroove entertainment, Rockstar Vancouver and Black Box Games. He has worked on over twenty major game titles totaling over 6.4 million units sold since 1994, including award-winning AAA titles such as EA’s NBA Jam, NHL11, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2, NBA Live ’95 as well as the indie award-winning title Retro City Rampage.  In film, he was the composer for the multi-award winning documentary The Corporation which is the highest grossing Canadian documentary in history.
– http://VideoGameAudio.com & twitter: VideoGameAudio

The world of Vessel is one of fantastic machines and unstoppable progress.  A technological revolution is in full force, with massive mechanization and automation transforming all aspects of modern life at a tremendous pace.  Mankind is witnessing its capabilities multiply many times over, unleashing possibilities at once astonishing, promising, and frightening. The reach and possibility of man seems now further than ever before, and the destiny of humankind is clouded with both hope and fear.

At the center of this world in great flux we find Arkwright, the inventor of one of the most promising machines yet seen in this great mechanical renaissance:  the ‘Hydrofluoric Galvanized Automaton’ or Fluro as they have come to be known.  Its purpose is seemingly simple, and utterly revolutionary: to transform the most plentiful substance on Earth into a machine that can perform labor.

These Fluros are animated creations of ordinary fluid, fused into movement by electro-chemical processes; they can be configured to perform a range of menial tasks, and are very effective at performing manual labor and operating the machines that have come to dominate the industries of this world.  Through Arkwright’s invention of the Turbine, he has been able to provide mass production of these tireless workers at virtually no cost, with the only limiting factor being the quantity of liquid on hand.

Industries across the world flocked to this invention, multiplying their profits and populating their factories solely with Fluro workers; workers which never tire, never demand better pay, and always perform their task exactly as specified.  The benefits of Fluro-operated production were immediate and plentiful, and with the extreme ease of introducing new Fluros into the industrial process their numbers increased at an astonishing rate.  Within a short period of several months, the population of Fluros grew to exceed that of humans.

As the sole creator of the Fluro device, Arkwright has benefited the most from the application of this machine, but he is not one to rest idly on his past successes; indeed he remains on the forefront of invention and operation of this new liquid-mechanical revolution, funneling the profits from his Fluro creation into new inventions that can further control and manipulate liquid matter.

Now, at the height of the Fluro’s success, we start to see something peculiar happening, something changing within what was previously thought to be the immutable nature of the Fluros.  In small numbers and spread out across the vast population of Fluros in many varied environments, adaptations are being witnessed.  Fluros are being found functioning in unexpected liquids, behaving in unexpected ways, and perhaps most alarming, reproducing themselves without the use of turbines, solely through their environments and with no human intervention at all.

Gradually these adaptations accumulate, piling on top of each other until the original Fluro design is barely recognizable within the new form.  Entire populations of Fluros across vast industrial sites transform, adapting to their environment and using it to their advantage in new and often dangerous ways.  Work-sites are being abandoned as Fluros grow in nearly limitless numbers, their new unpredictable natures posing a danger to humans in the hazardous environments they work in.

As their inventor and biggest proponent, this new development strikes Arkwright with a great deal of surprise as well as curiosity.  These machines, these unthinking automatons, have managed to adapt and best their human overseers, turning the enterprises of man instead to their own benefits, transforming the world in ways out of their owner’s control.  At the same time Arkwright realizes there is great value in the environmental adaptations of these Fluros, each serving as an intrinsic solution to the challenges of these work-sites.  Arkwright understands these machines better than anyone, and he takes it upon himself to travel to these work-sites, to understand and correct the problems these Fluros have caused and reverse the control of the Fluros, all the while investigating and applying for his own use the myriad evolutions he discovers in these unexpectedly flexible machines.  The depth of what he finds, and what purposes he applies them to, form the arc of the game ‘Vessel’.

As you can see our new trailer is live and all systems are go as we prepare to give the first live demos of Vessel at PAX tomorrow.  If you’ve been following Vessel since we first announced it as an IGF finalist, you’ll notice that’s it’s been through some big changes during the year and a half since then as we’ve been quietly working away.

Since that original prototype we’ve introduced some major new game mechanics based on our liquid physics, and redesigned the game from the ground up to focus on the gameplay and puzzle implications of these changes – we’re very happy with the results.  The art has also been reworked entirely; we’ve spent many months optimizing our rendering engine to handle the visualization of our liquid physics, adding improvements like refraction and distortion.  Our artists have done amazing work with the graphics pipeline we’ve developed that allows 2d hand drawn textures to render with 3d lighting, combining the best of both 2d and 3d graphics for a detailed, surreal look to the levels.  Fluro forms and animations are more detailed by a factor of 10. We’ve developed a dynamic clustering sound system to bring audio life to the liquid simulation. All in all, the game has gone through quite a transformation, and our ship date is just about in sight.

We can announce that we’ll be shipping on PC, XBox Live Arcade, and Playstation Network this winter.  We still have a lot of work to go to polish the experience to a high-shine by then, and the date will come up quick.  I can’t wait.

So for those of you that find yourself at PAX this weekend do stop by our booth and say hi, and for everyone else you can follow along on Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.  We’ll start sending out updates every Thursday starting next week explaining how we’re making a game out of fluid mechanics and give a look at some of the cool stuff we’ve added.

Oh and if you want to see the highest-quality version of the trailer (60fps vs Youtube’s 30fps, and lower compression) you can download it here:

http://private.strangeloopgames.com/Vessel%20Trailer.mp4

Thanks for checking out our game, stay tuned for more to come.

We’ve reached a point where we’re ready to start showing our game to the world as we work towards shipping at the end of this year, so watch for a lot more updates.  We’ll have a new trailer in a few weeks, and we’ll have a booth at PAX this month where attendees can try a playable demo, if you can make it definitely drop by and say hi.

But enough talk, let’s see some screenshots.

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.

Well, hi there, my name is Milenko Tunjic

As John has mentioned in his previous post, I have officially joined the Strange Loop Games and took a role of visualy directing the Vessel experience and honestly, I can not wait to start putting it all together.

I will be sharing bits and pieces of the art process as we go along with making the game.

I am also very excited to get together and work, once again, with Mr Mark Filipelli , an excellent artist and a dear colleague from the good old days.

In the first post, I will take it easy, and just share a few bits of preliminary art and hints of intended and currently proposed visual style of this unique experience. For the time being, it will be images only but in the upcoming posts I will talk more about the world, the characters and other relevant art thingies.

Kind regards to all,

Milenko