March of progress

Rani might be your avatar, but it’s clear who the real star is here – it’s their name up in lights, after all. The gunk is a marvel, constantly bubbling away in a way that feels unsettlingly organic, and reacting fluidly to your actions. This is thanks, in part, to ‘ray marching’, an algorithm that works with signed distance functions to create complex, interlocking 3D shapes in realtime. “The tech itself isn’t new, but it’s seldom used in games, and extremely rarely used for effects that the player has control over,” Hartelius explains. A more common use case is creating believable clouds, he says – “but we really wanted to see: what can we do with this that has never been done before? And how could a game take shape from that?”