I wrote this a full year ago, almost to the day; a month into my job, I’d been asked up to Manchester by Dark Energy Digital, creators of much-maligned game Hydrophobia. They went into administration not long ago; a month, maybe. I alone enjoyed Hydrophobia – more for what it could do in the future, and what it meant for the industry as a downloadable title, rather than the actual play of the thing. Reading this now makes me sad when I remember what passionate, friendly people made up the company.
(I heard about the phone calls they made in response to bad reviews. They made some bad choices; but they were very friendly to me, a useless, wet-behind the ears freelance journo. Even though I was working for a respectable mainstream mag, they were nice. Really nice.)
Being wined and dined (or, well, beered and curried) by a games company was a new experience for me, and it shows. What also shows is the way I thought you had to use phrases like “exhaled cigarette smoke into the cool April air” once you became a proper journalist. The piece was never published; I didn’t have the balls to send it into FHM for publication (which explains why I keep referring to myself as FHM), and it’s too long for web. Well, it’s on the web now, but you know what I mean. So this is the first time it’s seen the light of day, and I’m putting it forward unedited aside from fixing a couple of spelling mistakes:
We’re sat outside a cross between a bad Italian restaurant and a good tapas bar with the heads of Dark Energy Digital, and the subject of breasts comes up. After all, FHM is there, and we’re a definite authority as far as breasts go. We discuss nipples. As you do.
“I don’t think Kate actually has nipples,” says Ali Wood, the X of Dark Energy, forking some fried mushrooms into her mouth. “Maybe she should, though.”
Kate’s the main character from Hydrophobia, a game with some revolutionary new ideas (but no nipples as of yet). She’s isn’t a kickass buxom action hero like Lara Croft, but we sort of fancy her in a girl-next-door-from-the-future kind of way.
“You know,” Ali continues, “people are going to want to see her nipples. Teenage boys are going to want to see her nipples. Can we get the animators on that, maybe tie it into the dynamic water animations we’ve already got for her, so when she emerges from the cold water they stick out? Can we do that in time for release?”
We’re not sure if she’s joking or not, but one thing’s become clear – Dark Energy listen to what people say.
They’re only been operating under this name for 4 years (they were known as Blade Interactive before, and made a selection of racing and snooker games you’ve probably never heard of, and before that they were Mirage studios who made Rise of the Robots for the Mega Drive in 1995) but they’re doing their level best to make an impression.
What drew us in initially was a demonstration of their snooker simulator WSC Real 2011 – a game that’s eerily slightly more realistic than going down the pub and playing a few frames. We sat in a cramped North London PR room and watched as Rob Hewson, Head of Creative Development, talked us through the game’s physics engine.
“People want realism. You won’t be able to realise until we slow down the game,” he said, cracking open the slow-motion replay function with that has an almost fetishistic attention to detail, “but every single one of these balls is perfectly modelled, right down to the individual pixels. In other snooker games, when a ball curves it travels in a series of straight lines made to look like a curve. In our game, it actually curves.”
We’re a bit nonplussed as to why any of this should matter, but it quickly becomes clear. Short of the fact that your avatar briefly vanishes during replays (and fair enough, because while snooker balls are easy to model, Steven Hendry ain’t) it’s tremendously, fantastically real on an almost unconscious level. You stop looking for the edges and breaks and absorb the shiny ball-filled visuals.
“It’s basically porn for people who like physics,” says Rob, grinning madly. We can see what he means.
As we start playing the beta version of Hydrophobia in the glass-walled Manchester offices of Dark Energy, we see that it’s got that same level of attention to detail that gives certain glasses-wearers a raging hard-on.
The game takes place on a city-sized ship called Queen of the World. Terrorists attack it from the inside, making the whole bloody thing fill up with water, and the aforementioned heroine Kate has to fight her way out using the environment to her advantage.
The water is a bit like the snooker balls in WSC Real 2011 – it’s “fully realised,” which means that in physics terms, it actually exists in the game world. It’s not a series of pushes and pulls and graphical effects made to look and react like water, but it’s an actual formula which explains how and why water flows and moves the way it does, which is modelled in real time in the game.
It’s hard to explain in text, and much more satisfying to play about with in-game. If an enemy has stood near a glass window onto a room that’s filling up with water, you can shoot the glass and wash them away. You can open doors at range with your personal computer, get barrels of oil to float towards enemies, and then blow them up to cover the surface of the water with liquid fire.
Or – FHM’s favourite – you can snap off a shot at the many electrical cables suspended overhead, and electrocute everyone standing in the water near where it lands. The electricity arcs convincingly to metal surfaces and poor, unsuspecting baddies. There’s that same sense of almost unconscious satisfaction with the physics engine, coupled with the tremendously conscious satisfaction of setting up the perfect environmental kill combo.
“We’re a small studio, so we need an edge over the larger houses,” says Rob, as we wade through waist-deep water and duck into cover behind a crate. “You look at something like Call of Duty, that’s got hundreds of people working flat out and a huge budget. We can’t do that, so we have to think differently. The water formula is one thing we have, and the other is the HydroEngine.”
The HydroEngine is the core set of rules that power the world of Hydrophobia, and it’s been written in-house. Most companies will use a third-party game engine (something like Unreal or Havok), but Dark Energy didn’t want to. Mainly because they can’t afford to.
Rob pulls up the wireframe skeleton of the world on his PC. “When you’re developing most games, everything’s separate. The level design [i.e. where all the bits in the world go] is separate from the art assets [i.e. what everything looks like], so any changes have to go back and forth a lot before they look right.
“Plus, if you want to change anything at all, you have to go through a whole laborious updating process and make sure everyone’s got the right code. It takes ages.”
Not so in the HydroEngine. It all runs in real time, meaning that it’s possible for a designer to make a tweak to a level or an artist to update some textures while someone else is playing the game. If a wall or a crate is in the wrong place to make a fun experience, designers can move it and drop right back into the game seconds later with everything changed.
Our eyes are glossing over again with all the technical detail (and we offered you the layman’s translation in this article) but we can see why they did what they did – they’re the underdogs. They need to make games as quickly as possible with a small team (there’s probably about forty people in the office all told) so time, and effective collaboration, is of the essence.
All that clever technology has another effect – it means that Hydrophobia is small enough to download, rather than sell in shops. And with almost all but the big hitters (Call of Duty, Halo, Grand Theft Auto) suffering low sales in the recession, they’re looking to break into an emerging market.
The game’s retailing at £7 for a download, and has around five to six hours of gameplay with a fair whack of replay value thanks to a scoring system that rates your capacity to murder other human beings using your surroundings – there’s leaderboards and all sorts.
Dark Energy want to remove some of the stigma from download titles – that they’re fun, ten-minute minigames and not really worth the attention of serious gamers – and show that, as technology’s advanced over the last few years, you can get real games downloading to your home console.
Hydrophobia’s been out on the XBLA for a while, and to mixed response. The nature of production meant that the game lacked polish – and these guys are still finding their feet in terms of the industry – so some bugs and a series of frustrating interactions with the terrain lead to many reviewers praising the concept but slating the game, or just flat out slating the game.
But much like our promise of wet, erect nipples earlier, Dark Energy listened to the complaints and worked their arses off to make the game better for the PSN and Steam release. The Prophecy edition comes with not only new voice actors, music, and visuals but also a handful of gameplay tweaks. Not stuff you’d notice during play, but that’s not the point – if you can notice it, they’re not doing their job properly.
The game still lacks polish, true, and there are a few signposting issues (i.e. working out where you need to go next in-game) and repetitive game mechanics that larger studios wouldn’t have let slip by, but with that lack of polish comes a tremendous amount of rough charm. This is a game that’s been loved.
The background is tremendously complex – and in an interesting way, rather than the boring Tolkien-esque reams of material that crop up in stuff like Mass Effect. The plot’s all taken from UN predictions on water shortages, and the terrorists are modelled on the teachings of radical philosopher Thomas Malthus. You can see the ridiculous amounts of work that a small team have gone to in order to create a believable, engaging world.
Plus there’s stuff in there that’s fun – like a Zelda reference, and a Die Hard quote (your operator jokes “All together now – I bet this is now a TV dinner feels…” when you crawl into your first air vent). The scrawlings on the walls have the appeal of the safe rooms from Left 4 Dead mixed with snatches of philosophy and death threats. This is a much deeper experience than the price tag suggests.
Hydrophobia: Prophecy is the first in a planned trilogy, with the second title tentatively scheduled for download “before Christmas.”
Despite the flaws with the game, this is a team of developers with heart and a passion to make great games despite the problems they’ve faced. As the games proceed (and Dark Energy have the plots laid out for twelve games, let alone the three they’re releasing in the near future) we can look forward to some great things.
“We’ve got a bunch of new powers for Kate lined up – in addition to the hydrokinetic abilities she unlocks at the end of Prophecy, we’ve got shockwaves, Moses-style parting of the waves, and all sorts. We’ve got a hub-based method of play and we’re trying to make each section a bit more open-world. Well, as open as we can with all that water sloshing around.”
They’re keen, and they want to make a splash in a crowded market with a series that can hold its own. It’s a big ask, but they’re going about the right way, we think. That night, we end up drinking bitter sat outside The Oyster Bar in Manchester city centre next to a chatty young designed named Rich.
“We’re a small company, you know,” says Rich, then drags on his roll-up and exhales into the cool April night air, “but we’ve got some good people. We’ve got some really good people. We’ve got the best programmers I can think of and some passionate bosses. And we’re using some really awesome technology to let us do what we do.”
“So it’s working smart, not working hard?” FHM asks.
“Precisely!” He says, and thinks for a second.
“Although, actually, we work pretty fucking hard too.”
– FHM
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