The teams at Double Fine Productions are no strangers to creative and unusual games, from exploring wild worlds composed of different brains in Psychonauts to wandering the world as a walking lighthouse in Keeper. Now, the studio is taking on pottery with its latest game, a multiplayer title named Kiln.
In Kiln players take to a pottery wheel to craft a vase or jar to their liking before using their collection of vessels to brawl with others in objective-driven online multiplayer match-ups. Different pottery pieces have different advantages and disadvantages, with movement, abilities, and water capacity all determined by what players have chosen to sculpt.
Shortly before Kiln‘s launch, Game Developer recently spoke with Double Fine lead designer Lauren Scott and lead character artist Jared Mill about the process of actually making Kiln, and how the studio had to balance player expression and the actual nature of making a game fun to play. That meant determining the right way to handle hitbox collision, pulling back on the simulation elements of making pottery, and gently nudging players into the actual game.
From “a few lines of code stacked together in a trench coat” to a working pottery system
Kiln has changed shape significantly over the years, being born almost a decade ago out of Double Fine’s Amnesia Fortnight 2017, a studio-wide event where teams drop what they are doing to brainstorm and pitch wild new game ideas, building quick prototypes to show off rough concepts. When asked about the biggest of the many changes needed to go from a prototype to Double Fine’s next main project, Scott emphasized refining the actual pottery wheel itself, which was originally just “a few lines of code stacked together in a trench coat” for the purposes of the demonstration.
“We wanted to make sure that the shape that you made on the wheel mattered,” Scott says. “In the Amnesia Fortnight prototype, you could make this cool, weird looking thing, but there were no real gameplay mechanics mapped on to the thing that you made. So that was one of the things that we really wanted to explore, nail down, and actually create some like design underpinnings for that.”
Mill adds that a great deal of work went into making the “shape mattering,” with thought put into how a pot would have to move and attack depending on how the clay was put to the wheel, no easy task considering there are 24 different pottery types in Kiln.
“Our animation team sat down fairly early on when we were thinking about this and made a whole chart of every pot you could possibly make, all the major shapes, all the major sizes, and thought about what each character would be, what each would be like,” Mill says. “Then we built their animation set and their proportions and the entire character around that personality.”
Image via Double Fine/Xbox
Another problem that quickly presented itself came in the form of player collision. With so many different shapes, it wasn’t easy for the team to figure out how to handle hitbox issues that arose depending on the exact forms players were churning out on the wheel. The solution came through a version of capsule collision, a process by which cylinder-based objects can detect each other when they intersect in a game.
“We started out actually not using capsule collision, right? It was something that was much more tightly mapped to the pot,” Scott explains. “But we now, through lots of iteration, create your pot and then we map, I believe it’s the widest point and the tallest point, and we create simple collision around that so that we get the player experience that we want of your collision respecting the geometry around you so that a short plate can squeeze through like low little hidey holes, but a tall bottle can’t.”
Making pottery-throwing fun for people who don’t like getting dirty
Scott, Mill and others on the team took actual pottery classes in order to better understand the concept as they were working on the game, which quickly led to some important realizations and needed concessions for building a pottery wheel that players could use without becoming frustrated. Real-life pottery is fun but frustrating, and it’s a time-consuming process that can collapse at the slightest wrong touch. While at first the pottery wheel in Kiln functioned as something of a real-world simulation, Lauren says the team rapidly discarded the “unintuitive” aspects to make the experience more fun.
“There’s a certain point when making a pot on the wheel did feel like real life where you had to pull up the sides in just such a way, or else you would develop holes or it would flop over. There was sort of this feeling of almost friction,” Scott says. “And it really almost like one-to-one really felt like that experience. But what we found was that there was just, it was too much friction and it wasn’t really delivering on the player fantasy of being able to throw a pot. We went in real hard on the simulation side and then we pulled back to the player fantasy side. “
Image via Double Fine/Microsoft
In playtesting, the team has found that Kiln’s pottery tool can be so engaging that players sometimes don’t want to start the match. Mill notes that everyone enjoyed just stopping to make a pot, and it was originally only possible to throw a whole new pot in the middle of a round.
“We lived for a long time with that tension of players wanting to spend time on the wheel making a pot, but that then eats into their match time, so they’re feeling this pressure of getting off of the wheel,” adds Scott. “That was one of the high level things that we had to think about and work through as well.”
The team’s solution came in the form of the “Top Shelf” system, which allows players to choose from a collection of pots they’ve previously made as they play, so they have freedom to swap to another design if the pot they first chose for a match just isn’t working out. It’s similar to how players can change character roles mid-match in multiplayer games like Overwatch or Battlefield 6.
The other solution to making sure players focus on the combat? Sometimes you have to take away a good thing. Mill says that players can’t decorate a pot mid-match anymore.