Friday, October 11, 2013

Hydrophobia: Bites the dust?

Unfortunately Dark Energy Digital the makers of hydrophobia have gone bankrupt. I was looking forward to its sequels. It seems that a good game with novel water physics wasn’t enough to keep them afloat. Probably they would have benefited from some marketing. I for one didn’t buy the game because I thought it would be good, in fact I didn’t have high expectations at all and only bought it because it was on sale and I have a thing about H2O.
But then its almost exactly the sort of game I like, nice story interesting places, tricky (new) puzzles. But what I really liked was the water physics, I haven’t even been able to come close to replicating water to this quality in Pov-Ray. Another good point was helpful devs, there were more active than most dev groups I have seen and defiantly changed the game for the better after a bit of community involvement.

Though the point I set out to make was that indigamer startups often don’t work, regardless of how much they deserve it. Minecraft and Psychonauts are exceptions. Making your own game isn’t all profits, playtesting, steak and gravy. Mostly it seems to be years of packet noodles and hunting colons with a lot of bravado and talk.

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