Title:	Hydrophobia
Date:	05.09.2007
Platform:	PlayStation 3, Xbox 360
Genre:	Survival Adventure
Developer:	Blade Interactive
Publisher:	TBA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With the recent announcement of Hydrophobia, we decided to get to the bottom of the mystery and find out what the game is all about. For that, we spoke with Pete Jones of Blade Interactive about Hydrophobia and why gamers should keep a close watch on this title.

 

This is Part 1 of a two part interview. Here is Part 2

 

 

Please introduce yourself and the game Hydrophobia.

I'm Peter Jones and for my sins I've been in this business for er, nearly 20 years. I started with a company most of your readers probably won’t remember called MicroProse. I was a Director there and we did some great stuff including Gunship, Midwinter and Stunt Car Racer. I was also European MD for Sierra and a Director of ELSPA. Since then we've done to do our own thing.

Blade is a rather atypical company in that we don't do work for hire and we don't do conversions. I never signed up for that stuff; what I want to do is make a game that people talk about in 20 years time.

I honestly think Hydrophobia is that game - the technology is truly awesome. HydroEngine gives us real flowing water, it behaves exactly like real water and it’s entirely dynamic – the implications for gameplay are phenomenal. We also have a game design that is incredibly deep (pardon the pun); we haven’t even scratched the surface with the stuff we have revealed so far. This company is absolutely on fire right now. Fire and water, I must remember that.

Which came first, the HydroEngine or the story behind Hydrophobia?  If the HydroEngine came first, are there other plans to use it other than for Hydrophobia?

Ah the chicken and the egg debate. If I'm honest the water came first. We say that it has been in development for 3 years but its more like 5 in reality.

Our R & D Director Huw Lloyd has a PhD in computational fluid dynamics, his personal goal for some time now has been to do water properly in a game, and his team have been working towards HydroEngine for a long, long time in the background. Only now with this new generation of hardware can it be realised.

So yeah our water was first. We could have been forgiven at this point for doing a facile tech demo; white water rafting - easy. However we really wanted to create a game with a deep (there I go again) and involving storyline. We wanted the best people to work on it; our AI guy was AI lead on Rainbow 6 Vegas, our concept artist lead at Lionhead, our designer's rock. We have a team that genuinely want to make a difference, and we’ve built the game from the ground up to do just that.

You bet we will use our water for other things. It is completely black boxed and is interfaced with Havok and other mainstream physics engines.

Hydrophobia itself is produced by another product of our R & D team. We call it InfiniteWorldsGCS (GCS stands for Game Development Suite). The press release will go out later this week, but suffice to say it completely changes the way we create games. It does what it says on the box but it is far more flexible than anything out there at the moment.We plan to produce both InfiniteWorldsGCS and the HydroEngine as middleware. You heard it here first.

 

How did you come up with the idea of incorporating nano-technology and the Philosophy of Thomas Malthus into a game?

Crafty - two questions in one. I'll answer the second one first. We wanted to have credible bad guys with a real ideology, a real creed; more than just the anonymous terrorists you find in most shooters. Now that's a real tall order without upsetting any existing political, religious or ethnic groups, not to mention the environmentalists.

Then I remembered Malthus. My degree was in Economics and this guy had lain dormant in the back of my mind for years. He was a radical 19th century political economist who was very influential in the thinking of several important historical figures including Marx and Darwin.

 

His basic theory was that population would grow faster than its ability to feed itself. The neo-Malthusians have taken this up and have taken it to the extremes, believing that all attempts to increase food production will merely forestall the inevitable population crash. What they want is the crash now. When the game is set world population stands at 12 billion. They believe that less than half a billion is sustainable - heady stuff.

Our approach to the science of the game is very much inspired by the likes of Creighton; all his books have the veneer of scientific credibility - you kind of say "you know that might just happen one day". This applies to Malthus; for a long time his theory was thought to have been proven wrong – the world’s population continued to grow with no sign of the predicted crash. However many modern analysts have pointed out that Malthus could not have predicted artificial means of increasing food production i.e. pesticides, GM foods etc and therefore the crash was merely postponed. Malthusian theory is poised to raise its head again in politics, especially when you consider the implications of over population.

We followed the same approach to create Nanocell. Nanotechnology is going to have a huge impact on science, and one area of research currently being carried out is nanotechnology for water purification, which of course has the potential to hugely increase food supply – you see where we’re going with this?

 

Of course the Queen of the World is a haven for dodging regulations any other country would apply to Nanocell’s research, after all it’s effectively stateless, so who knows what might be unleashed from Nanocell’s top secret labs after the attack.

How will the story be conveyed to the player, by means of cut-scenes? Journals?

Cut scenes? Wash your mouth out! We have designed the game from the beginning so that the story line is told primarily during gameplay rather than between the gameplay in cut scenes. We spent a great deal of time structuring the way we tell Hydrophobia’s story – and it is a mammoth story – so that it is symbiotic with the gameplay.

 

Kate’s character arc is expressed through the gameplay she engages in, her skills develop in parallel with her narrative progression, and this applies to all the NPCs and various subplots, each of which are carefully weaved into one another.

 

We’re also providing truly meaningful agency to the player, so the story is coloured by the player’s unique actions.

NPCs?

More than you can shake a stick at. No anonymous characters here. We have hundreds of characters. We have given NPCs their own character arcs and backgrounds, and many of them will be involved in sub plots which interweave with the central plot throughout the game. Interactions with even anonymous characters vary how the game pans out – if you save a particular character then that character will have an impact on the rest of the game for example.

 

With the game taking place on a ship - albeit a huge city-sized ship - how varied will the locations be?  Will the player be exploring most of the Queen of the World?

As you suggest this is not a ship in the traditional sense it's a floating city. The player starts at the very top of the ship and is sent down to Deck A below the waterline in the opening moments of the game. Deck A is in itself incredibly varied.

 

The ship is comprised of two huge hulls; each many times bigger than the biggest ship afloat today. It really is huge - it is a ship for the super rich, condos start at $250m and end up in the stratosphere. It never ventures in territorial waters so there are no taxes and no controls.

If you think that is far fetched, think again. There are plans on the drawing board for a real world ship which is very similar to the Queen of the World.

The deck structure has a social metaphor about it. Deck A has heavy duty engineering, it has the foundation structures of 4 huge skyscrapers (I said the ship was big) which are owned by the companies that have financed the QOTW, known collectively as the 'Founding Fathers'. I don't want to give much more away, but this deck alone has an area nicknamed "Proleville" which is where all the lowest workers live - very Blade Runner like.

 

The next deck is on the water level, it has a marina, a beach, docks, military wings. We still haven’t discussed the rest of the ship, but pretty much anything you can think of will be represented. One of the benefits of our game creation system InfiniteWorldGCS, which you will be hearing about very shortly, is that it allows us to instance a huge variety of areas very quickly – so there’s going to be plenty to explore.

There is a concept drawing of the main character trying to open a door with her hands while holding her breath under water.  Can we expect to see these types of situations in the game?

Absolutely and much, much more. The water is truly incredible, and because it flows realistically it really is an intrinsic gameplay mechanic. I know a lot of people are looking forward to seeing it running – believe me it doesn’t disappoint.

 

 

Here is Part 2 of our interview with Pete Jones and the world of Hydrophobia.

 

Interview By: Alex Hammond