Q-Games' next entry in the PixelJunk franchise, PixelJunk Inc., will offer players a living world built around a continuously updating ecosystem, lead designer Rowan Parker told Polygon.
In PixelJunk Inc., players harvest ingredients, create massive factories and defend against enemy onslaught, all in the name of making soup. Players can create their soup empire with the help of friends; the game's co-op allows people to move independently of one another and accomplish tasks as needed. That's a good thing, because PixelJunk Inc.'s procedurally generated world is constantly moving.
"The world is completely deformable and terraformable," Parker said. "It's a sandbox world ... [It] is a whole ecosystem working where animals will eat different plant life and then grow and evolve. You can come back later and there might be a whole nest [of animals]. Even when [an area] is offscreen, it's updating."
This works for enemies as well, Parker said. If players leave their base unattended, they're essentially leaving it open for attack. The trick is to build defensive turrets and use the game's helper robots to harvest and gather soup-making ingredients.
PixelJunk Inc.'s robots have a large amount of freedom and behavioral quirks, thanks to the mini-programming language they function under. The results have been a surprising even to the game's creators.
"You can attach different actions based on the output or the input that they detect, so [robots] can find ingredients and harvest them to bring them back to factories, but they can also just come and give you a hug," Parker said. "But some of the bugs we had, they were infinitely hugging a plant, or infinitely hugging an enemy, or they thought we were ingredients for the soup and then they picked us up and tried to put us in the soup factory."
Soup factory success can be accomplished in many ways, depending on what they player puts the most value on, but ultimately the goal is for players to work together.
"We want people to work together and have fun with all of the sandbox parts to make whatever kind of soup factory they want to," Parker said.
Watch us play with Parker in the video above.
