Indie developer Q-Games showed off its upcoming game, PixelJunk Inc., at PAX Prime 2013, where players compete with each other in the cut-throat industry of making soup. In the game, they’ll be harvesting ingredients, building factories and defending them against enemy attacks.
The game’s world is procedurally generated. It’s also ”completely deformable and terraformable,” according to lead designer Rowan Parker, who added ”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.” Of course, players must make sure their own bases are protected while they’re away, with turrets and robots (which can also gather ingredients.)
”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 went on. “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.”
The game stresses co-operative play as well. ”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 stated.
PixelJunk, Inc. is being developed for PC, Mac OS and Linux.
