The upcoming puzzle platformer Animal Well has an unusual and lively art style. Indeed, solo developer Billy Basso of Shared Memory uses clever tricks with the PS5 console to bring his vast gaming world to life.
Animal Well is the first game published by Videogamedunkey publisher BigMode to be coming to PS5 and PC. We've known about the game since the summer, but now that a publisher has been found, we'll be able to play it as soon as possible.
When we think about what the PS5 can do, we usually think of cutting-edge photorealistic 3D graphics. A 2D experience, Animal Well uses a form of ray tracing famous as raymarching to provide depth of field and lighting effects for characters and backgrounds.
The full list of techniques can be found in the PS Weblog post.
Raymarching acts like a faster version of ray tracing, requiring less hardware. This is achieved through the rendering technique that divides the rays into smaller segments instead of drawing complete rays. For smaller games like this, especially 2D titles, this makes considerably more sense from an efficiency standpoint.
"Animal Well does a lot of little things that add up to the end result," Basso tells PS, and that's reflected in the game itself. It is critical to render an image to the screen from the background, middle, and foreground overlaid with particle effects, active lighting, blended lights, and fluid simulation. Combined, this makes it one of the best-looking platformers in recent memory.
Do it yourself
Arguably the most exciting thing about the development of Animal Well is that Billy Basso created an entirely new engine and then built the game from scratch. This is unusual for indie development, as many smaller studios would use GameMaker or Unity.
This progression means that the developer can make the game itself use impressively low latency for a game that plays as good as it looks. When creating an engine itself, there is no need for a buffer that you would find standard with the way standard game engines use the system's CPU and GPU together.
While it's certainly not a demanding game, these implementations show how the indie scene is taking steps to use the PS5 hardware in exciting new ways. It shows that large, demanding gaming worlds with next-gen graphics aren't the only things this generation's gaming hardware can do.