Ubisoft Reflections, an eight-person team working out of the UK, has announced Grow Home, a procedurally animated climbing game starring BUD the Botanical Utility Droid.
BUD must travel through a series of floating islands, shaping the world around him as he clambers to the top of a towering space plant in order to get back to his ship.
BUD’s hands are mapped to the shoulder buttons on a controller (you can use a keyboard and mouse, but the developers insist the game is designed with controllers in mind), so you’ll shimmy back and forth across huge chasms and swinging vine bridges, in a “physics-based and procedurally animated” movement system. Here’s an extract from Ubisoft’s announcement;
“Ubisoft has experimented with procedural animation before, but never with this degree of freedom of movement. Games like Trials are physics-based and procedurally animated, but the gameplay unfolds on tracks and courses instead of in a fully open 3D world. You can’t roam freely. Because BUD doesn’t have predefined animations and can travel in this 3D space, we are able to experience a much broader range of actions,” producer Pete Young explains.
This new game, along with tittles like Valiant Hearts and Child of Light, is part of Ubisoft’s ongoing commitment to allowing their developers to pursue unique passion projects outside of the AAA scene. For Ubisoft Reflections, it’s a break from working on huge projects such as The Crew and Watch Dogs, which they helped create alongside several other Ubisoft studios.
“We wanted to challenge how we make games at Ubisoft Reflections,” says Pete Young. “We’ve got a track record of developing massive AAA games and a strong technical heritage, but we’re also a lot more than that.”[b/]
Grow Home will be out on February 5. You can find it on the Steam store.
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