Osmos
Developer: Hemisphere Games
Platform: Windows (free demo available)
Nominations: Seumas McNally Grand Prize, Excellence in Design, Technical Excellence
Website
Description: Bounce around a petri dish, eating the weak and fleeing the strong. The catch? Moving costs you size, making you weaker.

What is it with indie-developed physics sims and circles? First it was Strange Attactors 2, then Impulse, and now this. The crazy thing is that they’re all different, although Osmos is a deviation farther from the mean than usual. The idea is simple: you absorb things that are smaller than you, like water droplets running together. The problem is that you can only move by expelling part of yourself, using your own volume like a rocket. So you’d better hope you’re still bigger than your intended target when you arrive, because they’re hungry too.

In addition to the surprising amount of fun this is all on its own, the developer has added a few tricks to smooth the process. Probably the most fundamental and important is coloration: blobs you can absorb are blue, blobs that’ll absorb you are red, and the colors change as you change in size. Not only does the field look cool as it blue-shifts (I’ll bet that the designers could exploit this feature for some trippy art and easter eggs), but having an obvious color cue lets you make split-second decisions about whether you want to collide with another blob. Just in case that’s not enough help, you can also slow time to fine tune your course when things get out of hand. There’s fewer than 10 levels in the demo right now, but with the right level design, Osmos will make an excellent game.

Katie’s Thoughts:
The game mechanism of “eat things to get bigger” is not an uncommon one. You see it in games from Katamari Damacy to the PopCap game Feeding Frenzy. Try and eat something too big, and it eats you. Osmos feels different from both of these games, however. It’s got much more of a “playing with physics” feel, because in order to move in one direction, you must shoot out matter in the opposite direction.

The game starts with a statement of Newton’s Third Law, and this quote is certainly at the heart of the game. Moving costs you size, but you must move to absorb other blobs and grow, as well as to avoid larger blobs (and therefore death). Similarly, when you are small, it takes the expulsion of only a small amount of stuff to move you forward, while when you are very large, the blobs you shoot out behind you would have killed you only minutes earlier. These blobs can form together and become a sizable foe and left unchecked.

The game currently has three “branches” of gameplay objectives, and only a few stages of play in each. In one, your goal is to become the largest object on the screen. You start out small and in a field of stationary blobs, some food and some foes. As the difficulty in this branch increases, you continue to stay small at the beginning, but instead of a stationary array of blobs, you are moving through a more and more dangerous field. In a second branch, your goal is to capture a blob that repulses you, and in a third, you are to capture a blob that actively runs away from you. The progression through the stages in each branch is a very natural difficulty curve, which is always appreciated.

Osmos encapsulates a lot of the fun of physics labs without any of the lab reports. Realistic physics is becoming increasingly common in games, and this is an great example of a game that lets you play with them.

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Tags:   Excellence in Design · GDC · IGF · Seumas McNally Grand Prize · Technical Excellence1 Comment

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