The beginning
Today, I’m really getting started. I quit my job last Friday so that I can work on this project full-time. I have some financial reserves to keep me alive during the period of development.
Development of what? That is still largely an open question. I know it will be a puzzle game, 2D, involving water. Simulated, flowing, splashing, dynamic water – something I have never seen used to this extent in a game before. However, this is about all I know right now; I don’t know yet how to turn water into a game. I have some vague ideas, but nothing concrete yet.
But before I spend a lot of time designing a game around water, I need to know whether it can be done. I took a class on computational fluid dynamics last semester. At the end of the course, I asked the professor whether a 2D water simulation could nowadays be done in real time, possibly employing the power of the video card for the heavy lifting. Since he’s mostly a FORTRAN guy, he couldn’t give me a definite “yes” or “no”, but “probably” was good enough for me.
Why aren’t there any games involving 2D water? Several reasons are possible. Maybe it simply can’t be done on today’s hardware. Maybe it can be done, but is too difficult for most indie game developers. Or maybe it is simply not possible to build good gameplay around it. Experimentation will tell …