vpance
Gold Member
Sound very ambitious, please don't be vaporware:
"There are four founders of Team Clout," ILL's game director and studio co-founder Max Verehin says. "We had an idea to make a brutal horror game with physics and decided to make a few videos that could represent our vision. It was a really small development to begin with. The road was bumpy. There were a lot of issues with location, team, and stuff like that.
"And then we sat and thought 'hey, we should really start developing seriously, full time.' In summer 2023 we got together with Mundfish Powerhouse, and that was the moment when actual serious production started. We built the team. We finished the playable internal demo."
You might recognize that name Mundfish – it's the studio that developed Atomic Heart. Powerhouse is a spin-off, boutique label built to find, publish, and co-create, in the studio's own words, the "next generation of standout games". With Powerhouse's backing, Team Clout has been able to grow into a studio of some 50 full-time developers and work on ILL in earnest. No longer the stuff of concept videos, everything that we've seen since 2023 has been captured in game.
"ILL is something that all four founders wanted to play in the future," Verehin continues. "We're inspired a bit by Half-Life 2, specifically the pacing, and how the story is told. It's that feeling that the whole journey is in front of you, that you start here and you need to get there. And that feeling that the world is alive. We're trying to bring a piece of that into our game. We're also pushing the physics-based elements. This could just be stuff in the levels – objects, breakable stuff. When you enter a room in ILL and there's a fight, after the fight, you'll see the room has changed because stuff isn't glued to the floor.
"We're also trying to push physics with enemies as well. I'm not saying our enemies are going to be procedural, but we are pushing the feeling. When you shoot an enemy, you feel that it's physics based, even though we're using some cheat codes and it's partly animated. You shoot an enemy, he falls, hits another enemy, and they react."
"Gore is really important," Verehin explains. "Maybe you remember Soldier of Fortune, where when you killed an enemy, you just wanted to see how the gore would work. We want players to be excited to explore this system. It's about how the enemy reacts to being hit – we want you to be able to see how the enemy's behavior changes if you shoot off their body parts. In one of the trailers, you might remember there's an enemy who loses its hand and then looks down to look at where its hand should be. This is part of our gore.
"But it's not just about the visuals. We also want you to feel the sound. If you shoot a revolver in a corridor, you'll feel like it's in a corridor. The sound of the shot itself is brutal and impactful. And our enemies are not regular zombie-like monsters. They do really sadistic stuff. This dismemberment system will change them, too. If they lose a limb, another enemy can be born from that limb."
HL2 inspired story
