A Fear of Water: Hydrophobia

Advanced Media Network recently had the chance to talk to Rob Hewson, the Lead Designer on Blade Interactive’s upcoming Hydrophobia. During our discussion, Hewson tells us why his upcoming Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 title is something to keep your eye on.


AMN: Most video games tell the story of man vs. man or man vs. Monster. Hydrophobia tells the story of man (and woman?) vs. nature. Is that a more difficult way to tell a story in the realm of video games?

Yes and no. In terms of actually creating a great story it’s quite liberating – I don’t envy the task many developers have trying to sidestep clichés in their quest to give their game about shooting aliens an original and compelling storyline.

We knew right from the start that we wanted to create an outstanding storyline as well as a brilliant game – so from day one the story has been an integral part of the design process. You can’t take gameplay mechanics and bolt a story onto them anymore than you can take a story and bolt gameplay onto it, they have to be designed in harmony.

You also have to work to the strengths of games as a story telling medium, rather than just relying on film techniques and chucking in cut scenes. In Hydrophobia we tell the story within the gameplay, and we allow players agency so that your choices make a significant difference to the story. The decision you make as a player of whether or not to save somebody from drowning will be both emotionally complex to make, and will have meaningful consequences.

We have spent a great deal of time working on the structure and delivery methods of the story, so from that point of view it has been a lot of work; but we wouldn’t want it any other way.

AMN: Tell us about the main character, Kate Wilson.

With Kate, we really wanted to create a multi-dimensional lead character. We wanted people to emphasise with Kate and grow with her as the story unfolds.

So, Kate is not an all-action hero, she is just an ordinary person caught up in an extraordinary situation. She has flaws and weaknesses, but she is capable of growing as a character to become more than the sum of her parts.

At the start of the game she is just another engineer onboard the Queen of the World. She tends to keep herself to herself, and she has this phobia of water.

Being Hydrophobic, it seems somewhat illogical to be working on a ship, but then again the Queen of the World is far larger than any conventional ship so Kate doesn’t have to go near the water, and as an engineer she has no doubts about the technology which is keeping her afloat – at least that’s what she would tell you.

Privately she also resents her irrational fear – she prides herself on being a logical person, hence her love for engineering, and as such being on the Queen of the World allows her to face her fear.

Subconsciously, she can’t let go of the events that caused her phobia in the first place – she feels an intense guilt and in a way she is actually punishing herself. In her innermost mind she cannot let it go.

AMN: Being hydrophobic, what happens when Kate gets around flooded hallways?

Kate’s phobia level will change depending on her situation. Since Hydrophobia is constructed using InfiniteWorldsGCS the phobia system has access to every conceivable piece of information about the environment, so the effect is incredibly dynamic.


We’ve done a lot of research into the effect of extreme situations on the human brain and used that information to create the phobia effects. For example one of the things that happens is that the brain stops processing colour vision in order to focus on more important functions, so in extreme situations in the game you’ll find colour beginning to bleed out of the scene – that’s just one of many visual and audio effects.

As I mentioned earlier, Kate’s phobia stems from an incident in her childhood, and the phobia system really comes into its own when the ship environments begin to morph in a hallucinogenic fashion to represent that incident. We have a spectacular procedural system which allows the walls and objects in the scene to literally begin to warp in real-time, it has to be seen to be believed.

The phobia system is more than just an aesthetic system, some actions will become more difficult when Kate’s fear level peaks, and players earn Judgement points from skilful play which can be spent to counter Kate’s phobia.


AMN: We know terrorists are involved in the plot. Are they going to have a large part in the game? It seems much of the attention has been focused on the water.

Most definitely – we deliberately created the Malthusians because we wanted the enemies to be more than just soulless canon fodder. They have a creed, they have a purpose and they have a collective spirit, in fact they’re almost cult like in that regard.

We are working on some incredible AI for the Malthusians, which again benefits from the information rich environments of the InfiniteWorlds system. Malthusians can track changes in the environment, they remember which areas are flooded and can keep track of doors they have opened and doors they have locked. They can exchange information with each other and constantly adapt their behaviour to changes in the environment.

Different Malthusians will respond in different ways to the environment. Some are fanatical idealists who will fight to the death and others are more like mercenaries who will respond with a more professional approach.

In Hydrophobia it’s not just about hiding in the shadows and trying not to make a sound, it’s about outwitting your enemies. You can leave clues like wet footprints and open vent covers to lead the Malthusians into a trap before remotely accessing door controls and taking them out with a torrent of water.

AMN: You reach back into the 19th century for some inspiration for the game that is set in the future, are there any other historical references in the game?

We’ve been very careful to ground our game in reality. The Malthusians themselves are an obvious example, having built their philosophies on an interpretation of the writings of Thomas Malthus, who was also very influential in the thinking of Darwin and Marx – so you can certainly expect those kinds of references to pop-up in numerous ways.

In addition to the historical references, there are also going to be a great deal of more contemporary references; things that are happening today and how they might be viewed in the future.

The basic tenant of the writings of Malthus was this theory that population size would always grow beyond food supply levels unless it were controlled, and that this would lead to a population crash. This theory was considered by many to have been made redundant because world population continued to grow beyond the point at which Malthus predicted the crash.

However, many modern day historians and political analysts are pointing to artificial food production and preservation methods; pesticides etc, which Malthus could not possibly have predicted, as factors which allowed food supply to keep up with population growth – in other words the big crash was merely delayed.

There are many people today who are predicting huge increases in world population – the 12 billion global population in Hydrophobia is actually conservative by some estimates, and in that kind of a world the thinking of Malthus is set to rise to the surface once again.

Our neo-Malthusians represent the fundamentalist right-wing of Malthusian politics as it might arise in the future; a terrorist group who not only wants to see population controlled, they actually want to usher in the population crash Malthus himself predicted in order to return humanity to a viable and sustainable size.


One of the main reason for attacking the Queen of the World, apart from destroying the decadent elitism it represents, is because a company onboard called Nanocell is developing nano-technology to purify water at the molecular level – to “Make the deserts bloom” as their press release states. To the neo-Malthusians this is a huge threat; an artificial means of increasing food production dramatically and therefore continuing the trend of ever growing world population.

Again the technology behind what Nanocell do in Hydrophobia is being researched in the real world right now. Nano-technology is set to become huge within the next decade and water purification is at the top of this list. Even the concept of the Queen of the World itself is inspired by the real worlds designs for a similar concept.

So we’re pulling all these strands from history, from modern scientific research and from contemporary political thinking, and we’re pulling them into the future along possible lines of development until they collide onboard the Queen of the World.


AMN: Is the game being natively designed for the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3?

It’s running on both platforms already. The InfiniteWorldsGCS allows the code to be optimised to take maximum advantage of the architecture of the respective platforms.

One of the key aspects of the InfiniteWorldsGCS editor is that it allows us to make changes to the game world in real time, in game and on platform. So, if I move a door or an object in the editor, I see it moving in real time in the game running on my 360 or PS3. Once I’ve made my change I pick up the control pad and start playing instantly. It’s an outstanding system.

AMN: What is the gameplay composed of? Stealth? Puzzle solving? Gunplay?

The water is central to the gameplay – it can be your enemy, but it can also be your ally. When escaping the water, players will need to use the dynamic grabbing and climbing system to cling onto the scenery and fight against the flow.

Managing Kate’s phobia in these situations is also important, and players can gain Judgement points by saving NPCs, solving puzzles and outwitting Malthusians. If you sneak past a Malthusian undetected you will get a bigger Judgement boost than if you escape while alerting them to your presence.

You also need to learn to use the waters flow to your advantage in order to take out enemies and solve puzzles – you can gain remote access to door controls using Kate’s engineering skills to help you manipulate the flow, and because the water is entirely dynamic you never get the same result twice. Taking into account the different behaviour of buoyant objects in the water is also crucial – you can inflict a lot of damage on that Malthusian downstream with a well timed push on a packed shelf unit.

As an engineer, Kate is also able to combine various components to create dynamic devices. Harvest a camera component from a security camera and combine it with a buoyant object to create a floating surveillance device, or substitute that camera with an explosive device and you’ve got yourself a floating grenade.

The most important thing to remember is that there isn’t just one solution and there isn’t just one route – the water causes emergent behaviour and the situation changes dynamically so you have to be ready to react.

As Kate grows as a character, you’re going to find that her abilities evolve with her, and that her reputation effects the react of the characters around her.

AMN: Other than the water, what does Hydrophobia have that no other game is bringing to the table?

Come on, our R&D guys bust their balls for years on end to bring true fluid dynamics to games for the first time and you still want more! Actually there’s a hell of a lot other than the water that Hydrophobia is going to bring to the table.

Firstly, I have to mention InfiniteWorldsGCS once again. It’s just such an astonishingly powerful system, the flexibility it provides is mind blowing and building games in this way has massive collateral benefits to other areas of the game because suddenly we have these information rich environments which all the other systems from AI to animation can utilise.

We’ve got a procedural texturing system in place now which can be applied to everything in the game – no two objects will ever look the same; imperfections, rust, denting, paint, fatigue, all generated procedurally and never repeating. You can stick your nose right against the wall and there is no loss of detail in the pits and scratches on the paint.


Of course all the parameters can be edited and update in real time in the game, so we can turn up the dents, turn down the scratches, change the paint scheme in a matter of seconds instead of getting an artist to create the texture from scratch each time.

So far I’ve just talked about the tech – in design terms there’s simply nothing else out there like Hydrophobia. The game will play differently every time you pick up the control pad, and your actions will have true, meaningful consequences.

Our desire is to make a game that people will talk about 20 years from now, and we truly believe Hydrophobia can be that game.

AMN: Will there be any multiplayer aspect to Hydrophobia?

We are working on multiplayer but I can’t announce any details at the moment.

AMN: When is the target for the release of Hydrophobia?

September 2008.