SONIC FISH GAME
The sonic fish game takes simulation to the next level. You are no longer the pilot of an aircraft, the driver of a car, the captain of a ship or the commander of a military ops base. You are no longer an abstract representation of yourself with the game providing you with an interesting platform to operate (the cockpit, dashboard, etc). The key difference between the sonic fish game and other so-called “simulations” is that this is a simulation in a hard sense of the word; you are no longer yourself.
Instead, the sonic fish game actually gives you an opportunity to experience life as another kind of life-form. Instead of dressing up the screen with unrealistic radar displays or energy meters (which living organism hallucinates energy meters floating in front of its eyes? Well, maybe keen Quake players do but it’s a point of contention as to whether they’re strictly “living” or not), the sonic fish game is an immerse experience in which you become the creature you are playing.
The sonic fish game is set underwater. A phenomenally powerful engine perfectly simulates the fluid dynamics of the coral reef in which the game is set.
Unfeasibly powerful 3D renders other aquatic creatures around you in ridiculous detail, their movements handled by the game engine with total realism; rather than a simple 3D flight engine inside the game with the illusion of fluid dynamics controlling movement (Ecco the Dolphin, anyone), when a squid pumps its tentacles the game’s fluid engine tracks the disturbance caused in the water and the squid moves accordingly.
The aim of the game is to colonize as many corals as you can so that your fish prosper and multiply. Here’s the deal;
One of the species in the game is a slow and vulnerable creature which clings to the coral reefs. When it is clinging happily to a reef, it spews out little plankton-like microbes which nourish and sustain your fish, meaning that the nearer you are to one of your coral reefs the more energy you have. If you stray very far from your territory you start to tire and become vulnerable. You therefore have to ensure that these slow creatures propagate throughout the archipelago and turn as much of the waters as possible into your territory.
As a more dynamic and rude fish, it is the job of you and your colleagues (did I mention that the game is massively multiplayer also?) to clear the path to corals held by the enemy. Once you have cleared an adjacent coral, some of your slow creatures will start their painstaking migration towards the coral [note to Jon: this is inspired by the FAS in raider wars] and you will have to defend them from attacks by enemy fish. If your creatures make it to the coral, they’ll settle on it and soon afterwards start spewing out plankton for your team, hence expanding your range.
The game comes into its own in the bizarre interface. Without unrealistic radar displays or anything, how do you know what’s going on? Simple. It’s not called “sonic fish game” for no reason.
You play the game via a completely immerse headset which is capable of handling three-dimensional 360 degree sound. The other fish around you can be heard—different fish make different sounds, and from such things as the pitch, volume or timbre of the sound an experienced player can discern, without having to look round, what direction an audible fish is moving in, how fast it is going, or even what its intentions are (enemy fish sound different from friendly fish). A fish coming to attack you from behind will be obvious as a sound rising in volume and slightly raised in pitch (the Doppler effect as it moves towards you). When you’re dealing with hundreds of thousands of fish of various sizes in the water, the range of sounds would be quite unsettling for a first-timer, and it would take a lot of playing time for you to develop the ability to hear the weird subaquatic plethora of noise and be able to decode that into a mental 3D map of what’s going on around you.
As regards combat, it’s currently planned out so that most of the fish have a pseudo-scientific “electric eel” effect where they can electrocute other fish in combat, but other options such as simple biting fights or nose-mounted spears (like swordfish) are being considered.
Each team of fish consists of the same group of species; it’s not an inter-species conflict but a kind of inter-tribes conflict. The game mucks about with fluid modeling, 3D graphics, “swim” engines and spatial sound design at a level that’s frankly impossible to accomplish with today’s technology. So the Playstation 2 can render individual hairs on a human head? The kind of machine needed to run the sonic fish game would make the Playstation 2 look not like an Altair or a PET but instead like something with as much computing power as one of the anemone-like creatures the game revolves around.
The desired effect is to drive players insane by immersing them in this utterly realistic aquatic environment and actually giving them the aural senses of the fish they are playing, surrounding them with maddeningly complex sonic data from which they’re supposed to discern enough information to save their asses and those of their team-mates. The ultimate winners will have populated every coral reef in the archipelago with their anemone, and have their own nourishing spores floating around everywhere! Total aquatic domination from Chimps With Keyboards, in the shops hopefully before most of you are drawing your pension.