Metroid Prime - Retro Studios
Almost two decades ago, when Metroid Prime released, its scan visor felt like a revelation, a way to ask questions about anything you saw in the world, to study and uncover the world entirely at your own pace. I fell in love with it back then, along with the elegant way the planet of Talon IV unfolded, and it has been in the back of my mind ever since. So when I sat down to make a game, the scan visor was one of the first things that jumped back into my mind as an idea I wanted to develop. In Other Waters could be thought of as a Metroid game where you play as a scientist, an unfolding world that for you to study and learn to understand, not just cut a path through. The “metroidvania” is a busy genre nowadays, but In Other Waters is something else—a game inspired by Metroid, but one that takes a distinctly different path, one that suggests another way of relating to the environment around us.
Annihilation - Jeff VanderMeer
For me, the best science fiction is about scientists. Those who ask the questions in worlds where the strange and the normal become inseparably mixed. VanderMeer’s novel (and the Alex Garland film adaptation that brilliantly mashes it up with J. G Ballard’s The Crystal World) is exactly this, a blending of the everyday and the impossibly surreal, presenting an expanse of wilderness where things, and people, become something else. Annihilation gives us mysteries without easy solutions, as a group of scientists mount a ragged expedition into strange territory. But the beauty of the book lies in its exploration of our relationship to the natural world, and its capacity to change and challenge us. In Other Waters traces the same path through its own strange territory, one that touches on what it means to be human (or non-human) in an era of environmental collapse and crisis.
Capsule - Adam Saltsman
There’s a single moment in Adam Saltsman’s and Robin Artnott’s lesser-known submarine game that feels like it has a key role in the inception of In Other Waters. Tasking the player with piloting a submarine through mine-infested depths via a grubby interface, Capsule’s best tricks involve giving dots names and sounds and letting you fill in the rest. The first time I encountered a Therium and it blurted out a whale-like call before rumbling along the side of my capsule I took my hands off the keyboard and just waited. It was incredible to see such a moment created with just audio and a dot. In Other Waters is that moment expanded out into a full game, where the gaps between signals, sketches and sound are yours to fill in.
Cougar No7 RF-877 - Panasonic
The Cougar No7 is a thing of beauty. This 1973 portable radio looks like something straight out of a Star Wars or Alien sequel, all radial dials and plastic plating. When I sat down to design In Other Waters I wanted to get away from the now tired aesthetic of pale blue holographic interfaces layered with thin lines and too-much-data. So I turned to the industrial design of iconic objects like the Cougar No7 as well as the bold interfaces of 1990’s animes like Neon Genesis Evangelion and Mobile Suit Gundam Wing. The result is a UI that is bold and colourful, while still being tactile and chunky, with an asymmetry that is more industrial dashboard than Apple design award. I still have a little model of a Cougar No7 on my desk, to remind me of the humble origins of the game’s visual design.
Expedition - Wayne Douglas Barlowe
First printed back in 1990, and now out of print, in his book Expedition, Wayne Douglas Barlowe imagines himself to be the “artist in residence” for humanity’s first trip to an inhabited alien planet. Filled with beautiful sketches and paintings of impossible life imagined by Barlowe himself, the book feels like an incredible artifact from another reality. Expedition, and books like it, fascinated me as a teenager, and In Other Waters is my attempt to pay those experiences forward, by creating my own world of impossible life and strange creatures to uncover. Fed by two years of research and reading, I hope the ocean of Gliese 667Cc can sit alongside Barlowe’s Darwin IV as a chance to peek at another world, where things might be different to our own.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/890720/In_Other_Waters/