Vessel (video game)

Strange Loop Games is a company founded by two programmers: John Krajewski and Martin Farren. Both former employees of Electronic Arts, they left in order to pursue creating games with new and interesting gameplay mechanics instead of high quality graphics.[7] The Vessel team includes Milenko Tunjic, the art director, and Mark Filippelli, the lead artist. Both are responsible for creating the visual component of Vessel's steampunk world.[7] Further, under the direction of audio director Leonard Paul and audio programmer Kieran Lord, all of the music was composed by electronica musician Jon Hopkins.[8]

The game itself consists largely of a custom liquid-physics engine, as well as music and artificial intelligence engines.[8][9] The physics engine consists of individual particles that exhibit pressure on one another, as well as taking surface tension and viscosity into consideration. The created fluid shapes are also illuminated through a clustering algorithm that adds point-lights to a liquid depending on how closely packed a group of particles are.[9] The artificial intelligence engine works in conjunction with the individual particle physics of the liquids in game.[9] Vessel uses a custom built engine that specializes in physics and fluid simulation.[7]

The art of Vessel is 2.5D, a pseudo-3D style. It visualizes the steampunk world and allows the player to look at a machine in the game, and see all of its components and how it functions. This helps the player learn what they need to do in order to play the level and fix the machinery.[3]

The music, composed by Jon Hopkins, builds as you progress towards solving a specific puzzle. Upon first starting a puzzle, the music is smooth and put towards the background. As the player begins to figure out the puzzle, the music gets increasingly more complex, adding in drums and bass. By the time the puzzle is complete, the full music track is playing.[3] The game contains 7 tracks from Hopkins' 2009 album Insides (including the eponymous track Vessel), and 3 from his album Contact Note.

The sound of Vessel was the topic of a talk at the 2012 Game Developers Conference. Leonard J. Paul, the game's audio director, discussed its sound design and implementation. Using FMOD, Lua, and C++, the game uses techniques such as granular synthesis, subtractive synthesis, layered sequencing, spectral layering, LFO modulation, and asymmetric loops.[10]