Physics-Based Puzzle Game Claybook Coming Soon to Xbox One

After nearly two years of development, we’re excited to announce our studio’s first game: Claybook, a clay simulation puzzle game. In Claybook, both the environment and the characters are made from deformable clay. Everything has a permanent effect on the world around you, but your clay’s shape changes as well; the characters and world is in constant interaction with each other.

During early development, we noticed our unique clay world opened a whole new set of possibilities for game mechanics. It took some experimenting with all the combinations to find the ones that fit together best. For example, our characters could always carve holes into walls, but this mechanic became much more interesting when we added fluid simulation to our game (carving holes into big tanks filled with fluid is so much fun!).

Simulating and visualizing realistic clay required a lot of custom technology. During the project, we created our own clay simulation and visualization technology. We call it Clayfield, a digital playland made out of clay that produces a volumetric game world that can freely be shaped and deformed — it’s the heart of our game.

This is only the beginning for Claybook’s development. We hope the game continues to evolve through its lifetime and we welcome the gaming community to find new and creative ideas to shape the future of our clay-based world.

Our studio, Second Order, was founded by Sebastian Aaltonen and Sami Saarinen in late 2015. At that time, we both had worked for over 12 years at RedLynx, a Finnish game development company known for Xbox Live Arcade hit games Trials HD and Trials Evolution, playing an important part in the Trials core team (I was the Senior Lead Programmer, Sami was the Technical Art Director). We felt it was time to step up and create our own studio to bring our passion for physics-based gameplay and user-generated content to new heights.

Stay tuned to Xbox Wire to find more information about Claybook. And feel free to reach our team on Twitter and Facebook, as well as our official site at claybookgame.com.