It's perhaps a little ironic that the black, gooey substance that would go on to give the game its name would end up being the most difficult part to nail down, but it presented the team with a lot of real world technical challenges. At one point, it was very open world-ish, but that had its challenges, not to mention how you interacted with the mist, which of course became the Gunk." We tried going too deep down various avenues. "I love that ongoing, not cutscene-stopping narrative kind of storytelling, and it suited itself very well to that." "We had a lot of bits and pieces, but how do we make a game out of it?"īefore Hartelius could go any further, though, there was one final question that needed answering: "We had a lot of bits and pieces, but then it's how do we make a game out of it? And that took a long time, and a lot of experimentation. "I'm really fond of the radio banter that we have in the game," he continues. ![]() They knew they wanted a female lead driving the story forward, and that she'd have what Hartelius describes as "a scrappy kind of enterprise doing odd jobs for big corps" with her best mate. "And is it covering the entire level or just sections? Does anything happen when you remove it? Or is it just to see what's underneath? Does it affect the environment? If it's covering the environment and removing it changes the level geometry, then it must be some kind of corrupting influence, some kind of pollution… A lot of things like this came very naturally to us."Īround the same time, the team were also starting to peel back the layers of The Gunk's underlying story. "This mist, what could that be?" he muses. Realising they'd struck on a good idea here, Hartelius then started asking a lot of questions. "It really triggered that itch for exploration, and everyone just really liked it," says Hartelius. The prototype soon gathered speed as Hartelius and his team started to pass it round the office, the bulk of which was still working on polishing up their deck-building RPG SteamWorld Quest at the time. We made it so you could just suck up these balls, and that way you would reveal this jungle environment as you were exploring and picking up coins." We could probably do something if we did just focused on that, so we ripped everything else away and just had this little tiny thing that was a top-down jungle environment made from like one mesh, and we filled it with mist as little balls. It was a game with a lot of different abilities, but it had a blowing and sucking wind mechanic - that was pretty cool. We figured out it was doing way too much, but we liked one aspect of it. "For various reasons, none of these prototypes really took shape, but at one point we stepped back and looked at the last one we'd been doing. Creatively we wanted a break from the SteamWorld games, and that world to recharge our batteries and do something else and be allowed to do other things. ![]() Some of our early prototypes were SteamWorld, but The Gunk's prototype wasn't, which was also very intentional from our end. "The main spark for The Gunk came from working on different prototypes in Unreal and getting up to date with the engine and working in 3D. "We'd only ever done 2D games in our own in-house tech," director Ulf Hartelius says. As it makes its way to Steam today, I sat down with director Ulf Hartelius to talk more about the creation of the game's titular goop, and how the timing of its environmental themes about cleaning up its gunked up planet was much more than just a Death Stranding-style happy accident. Not only was it their first game in 3D, and their first time using a new engine, but it was also their first title that had nothing to do with the series they'd built their name on. ![]() Released on Xbox Game Pass at the tail end of last year, The Gunk was a big step up for the makers of SteamWorld Dig. With their latest game, The Gunk, they've finally entered the realm of 3D adventure games. Over the last ten years they've tackled every genre, from tower defence to turn-based tactics, RPGs and action platformers. Finding your niche can often be the key to success for smaller developers, but Swedish team Image & Form refuse to be pigeonholed.
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