How did a nine-year-old game about competitive pottery get resurrected as Psychonauts 2 developer Double Fine’s next game? “I’m still trying to figure that out,” says Derek Brand, project lead on Double Fine’s new game Kiln.
Kiln, out Thursday, was first prototyped back in 2017 as part of Double Fine’s recurring Amnesia Fortnight event, during which developers at the studio pitch new game concepts. That year, 25 game pitches were considered. Kiln’s concept was “a multiplayer, team-based brawler with a focus on creating unique player sculpted characters featuring crazy physics-based animation and destruction.” Brand’s pitch for Kiln wound up being the team pick at that year’s Amnesia Fortnight.
“At least internally, people really loved it,” Brand tells Polygon. “We found some kind of magic in that prototype that got people playing it a lot, even past Amnesia Fortnight. It just felt like it was in the air, I guess.”
But the realities of game development meant that Kiln’s journey from pitch to wide release took nearly a decade. Brand worked as the lead artist on 2019’s RAD and as concept artist on 2021’s Psychonauts 2 in between, but Kiln endured as a concept that the Double Fine team loved.
“Since we were working on this during COVID too, and the team is pretty hybrid, it was a great way to keep the team communicating and together,” Brand says.
In Kiln, players make custom pottery — bowls, jugs, vases — of varying sizes who become warriors on a multiplayer battlefield. Players’ ceramic vessels carry water in their bodies as they fight to extinguish their opponent’s kiln (and protect their own), and meet in mortal combat, battling with fists and special abilities. Kiln is as much about creative expression as it is about smashing your enemies.
“The whole idea came from: I want to make weird little guys, and I want someone else to make weird little guys, and I wanted those guys to fight,” Brand says. “The more we learned about pottery and learned about that art and craft, the more it felt like we really wanted to use this as an opportunity to share the craft and the art to more people. The creation aspect [of pottery] can be intimidating to people, especially in our earlier prototypes when we were sitting people down, and they’re like, ‘I don’t know what to make. This is hard.’”
Making pottery in Kiln is far easier than it is in real life. Throwing and sculpting clay on a wheel is much harder than it looks, in my own experience. You’re always just seconds away from disaster or starting over when making pottery, to say nothing of the kiln-firing process itself, where pots can often crack or explode.
