Doing with words at speed

Image credit: Bithell Games

When you start to think about verbs in games, you start to realise how few of them are really at your disposal in most releases. There's only so many features a game can have after all, particularly a 3D one. But for Mike Bithell and his next game Vampirium: 1997, keeping things slim lets him put a new verb in without much hassle.

Bithell announced Vampirium earlier this month. It's an immersive sim, but not the kind you're used to, as it's all text, menu options, a map to position yourself in, and a few 2D images for flavour. This is a marked difference from the licenced games he worked on previously like John Wick Hex and Tron: Identity, but after the latter performed quite poorly, and Bithell Games had to lay off most of their team, they were left with at least one thing: independence.

"It is nice to have complete control and to… not have to worry about the absolutely reasonable concerns of major corporations," Bithell tells GamesIndustry.biz in an interview. He shares his satisfaction in just making "something that feels very me, and to be able to talk about it completely freely and give honest, complete answers to what we're doing with it. I'm really enjoying that aspect of it. Right now I'm loving what I'm doing. I want to go wherever this game takes me. I genuinely think there's awesome potential."

Part of that potential lies in the "im-slim" format he's taking with Vampirium, saying that "It's taking the possibility space, the verbiage, the ability to figure out your own path through a space of immersive sims, but then abstracting it into this tile-based game." His main focus is keeping the visuals as simple as possible so that the interaction can be as interesting as it can be.

"That, to me, is the thing that I care about as a player of [immersive sims]," he says. Keeping everything as just tiles and text frees Bithell to "massively overinvest in the possibility space. So I can make a mechanic very quickly, I can add a new verb to the game in a couple of days. And when you compare that to if you wanted to add a new mechanic to a traditional 3D game, obviously that's an enormous investment of time."

Bithell doesn't know if this approach will ultimately work, though he says "It'd be a terrible shame if it wasn't. I think for me, it's much like real dieting. It's about slimming the right aspects of it." He relays a story of a playtester asking why they couldn't push another character, and how that opened up a whole thought process over how pushing might work, in turn being implemented fairly quickly. So at least in terms of production, it sounds like it's working. The question is whether people will resonate with it! I am so far, at the very least, and if you are too you can wishlist it on Steam now.