With that in mind we tracked down Jonathan "Bidds" Biddle, the design director at Curve, for a few e-mail questions. Check them out, check out the review and, perhaps, check out Fluidity the next time you fire up your Wii.
IGN Wii: Being WiiWare, Fluidity might not be known to as many gamers as a traditional retail release. Simply put - what is Fluidity?
Bidds: In Fluidity, you control a body of water on the pages of a magical book known as the Aquaticus. The Aquaticus has been invaded by an evil ink known as The Influence, and the player must use their water to purge the pages of this evil by releasing the book's magical Rainbow Drops. Each Rainbow Drop is a special task in itself that must be sought out and completed. While having many useful properties in itself, your water can also be changed into either ice or steam by freezing or heating it.
The magical Aquaticus also bestows special abilities onto your water in its various forms that help to create some really cool interactions. To top it all off, this is set in a Metroid-like structure on the book's pages. You have to use your abilities and different water states to explore the pages to find and release Rainbow Drops. The game features a huge amount of gameplay variety and takes many hours to finish.
IGN Wii: Where did the concept of shifting water on screen come from? Was this inspired by observing water movement in real life or did this stem from experiments on some other project?
Bidds: When we first created the Fluidity concept way back in 2006, we had long been interested in creating a video game based on water. Water is universal and a part of everyone's life. People wash themselves with it, have fun at the beach or the swimming pool, drink it, bath in it for pleasure, and everyone knows about the basic forms it takes at different temperatures. It's hard to think of anything that is more universal than water. Certainly no one has a bad image of water!
The concept really came together when we saw the Wii Remote for the first time. We thought that the intuitive action of tilting a Wii Remote would mirror everyone's real life experience of water and create a control scheme that would be instantly understandable. Once we put the original concept together, it was obvious that we'd created something special.
IGN Wii: What lead you to work with WiiWare versus some of the other platforms out there?
Bidds: When we started Curve we decided that we didn't want to work on large scale, big budget console releases anymore. Initially, that meant handheld console games, but when the digital download services appeared we felt that it was the perfect space for us. We could make interesting, creatively-led titles for lower cost and in less time, and we created a number of concepts for this space, one of which was Fluidity.
WiiWare was particularly interesting to us because of the controller, and because of Nintendo's exceptional heritage. We've been lifelong fans of Nintendo games, so we were very excited when we approached them with the Fluidity concept for WiiWare and they agreed to sign it up. The development was great fun and an amazing experience for all of us here at Curve.
IGN Wii: Obviously the core concept of moving water evolves and you have players managing more complex objectives. Tell me how you went about evolving and developing the gameplay beyond the basic water concept?
Bidds: The original concept for the game always included the ability to change state from water to ice or steam. We set about exploring how this would work in a gameplay context during development by creating lots of levels that featured puzzles based on this feature. We had water carrying the cogs and ducks, cloud being used to navigate to different areas and ice to climb or freeze objects inside. These levels were more of a typical A to B style, with the aim being to get to the end of a level with as much water as possible.
As we got deeper into development we realized that we weren't offering as interesting gameplay as we could and so through discussion with Nintendo, we evolved the title to incorporate the special abilities into each state, and also changed the structure to the Metroid-like structure we have today. We took a lot of the puzzles we'd created for the A to B levels and placed them in a larger overworld map, with hubs which had routes leading off them. We wanted to reward exploration, so we locked areas of the map behind Rainbow Drop doors – like those seen in Super Mario 64's castle – and also beyond areas that require special powers to progress through.
Like in Metroid, players can see areas that they might not yet be able to reach, but if they remain curious and return later, we're always sure to reward them with something interesting. In terms of the puzzles, each of the Rainbow Drop sections was a bespoke, separate section worked on by an individual designer. We encouraged the designers push the game's mechanics as far as they could within that puzzle, and then moved that puzzle into the main game map. This has resulted in lots of very different feeling tasks for the player to complete, and is one of our greatest triumphs in Fluidity.
IGN Wii: With the game done and available for download, do you have ideas for a possible sequel or are you moving on to new concepts? Is this something you'd want to see portable - perhaps on the 3DS?
Bidds: We have lots of ideas for a sequel, and would love to work on 3DS, but, as the game's publisher, that is for Nintendo to decide. It'd certainly be interesting to see how the 3D effect would work when you're tilting the device, and how we could detect that on the hardware.