The story of "Killdozer"/"Flank"

In 2006/2007 I had the crazy idea in my head for building a game based around super dynamic terrain. The idea was to not just "dent" the terrain like traditional deformable terrain, but to use some sort of "sleepy" fluid simulation to simulate multiple different materials like water, sand and dirt. I called this idea "project killdozer" because one of the ideas this would allow would be having bulldozers push dirt around.

Then around 4 or 5 years ago Chris Lamb, Dane Johnston, and I were working on trying to make an RTS that would map equally as well on PC/Mac and Tablets in our spare time. Fundamentally that meant a Myth style RTS (no building, just combat), and a click-and-drag or touch-and-drag camera, and context aware interaction with units/items. But we eventually gave up on that particular project because our day jobs didn't allow enough time to ever really complete the vision so we moved onto something a bit simpler. We had only gotten to some basic prototyping phase of development before moving on, but I came across some video captures and thought it was time to share them. But while I didn't fully realize the "killdozer" dream before killing the project, that was where I was headed.

With that said there was some pretty cool tech involved considering our target was iPad (although these videos were captured on PC).

It used an engine that I have been fiddling with for the last 10 years or so as a hobby, never had really used it for much successfully though (never enough time to ship a game!), but because of that it actually had fairly mature tools and supported a wide range of platforms. I was also always totally obsessive about CPU performance so when mobile came around it really handled the transition quite easily.

A layered terrain system that was deformable. This basically worked by layering different heightfields on top of each other each with different properties. Sand on top of dirt on top of bedrock, etc. This allowed the user to deform the level and change gameplay, but also allowed the level designer to place hard limits and obstacles in the environment.

But probably the coolest thing was a GPU (using pixel shaders) volume conserving shallow water simulation. The idea was we wanted to plan for some cool events in the game like breaking dams to change the layout of the map in various ways during gameplay. Eventually my plan was to extend this simulation to the terrain itself, but never got around to it.