![]() At this point, the project was in the very early stages: I had a couple of metal rooms with ragdoll characters inside them, some rudimentary water logic and a really simple subm… station editor. From Subsurface to BarotraumaĪt the end of 2014, I announced a game called Subsurface, intended as a procedural 2D simulation game taking place in an underwater facility. So, some time around early 2014, I started thinking about a game idea that would essentially take bits from SS13, Dwarf Fortress, a game concept called Pressure, and to some extent my previous game SCP – Containment Breach, and try and combine them into something that hadn’t been done by too many games before. Despite this, the core concept is wonderful – it takes the emergent storytelling aspect of Dwarf Fortress and turns it up to eleven by making it multiplayer and adding human interaction to the mix.Īll that is pretty much what pushed me to start developing Barotrauma: I wanted to play a game that builds on the foundation of SS13, smoothing some of the rougher edges. I love it, but it has its flaws – not just the clunky UI and technical problems, but I also feel it’s almost a little too sandboxy: with so much freedom and very loose objectives, the rounds can easily become pretty uneventful. It runs on an ancient game engine called BYOND and has an even steeper learning curve than Baro. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, SS13 is a rather obscure indie game that’s gameplay-wise very similar to Barotrauma. That’s why I find games like Space Station 13 and Dwarf Fortress so interesting: rather than dishing out a pre-designed experience, they drop you into this open simulation and let the stories and experiences arise organically.Īs mentioned multiple times in this blog, Space Station 13 is perhaps the biggest individual source of i nspiration for Barotrauma. A book can tell a story, a movie can add a visual aspect to that, but they can’t throw you into a world and say “okay, welcome to Europa, go and do stuff, and we’ll see how your story plays out”. ![]() I’ve always loved sandboxy games that make use of procedural generation and emergent gameplay – not only are they fun to m ake, but I also feel they offer something that not many other types of media/art can.
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