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San Rafael, California-based independent studio Vector Unit has been operating under the radar for about two years, but at the recent PAX East consumer gaming event in Boston, the studio revealed its debut Xbox Live Arcade project: Hydro Thunder Hurricane, the first true sequel to the 1999 arcade and Dreamcast powerboat-racing hit.

With only two core employees, creative director Matt Small and technical director Ralf Knoesel, along with roughly half a dozen more contractors during peak development, Vector Unit has stayed lean -- which is exactly how the founding pair likes it.

The Indie Catalyst

"Our goal is to make games that, as far as we are able to, feel like retail games, but are stripped down enough that we can produce them with a small team," Small explained to Gamasutra.

Small and Knoesel met in the late 1990s at the now-defunct Stormfront Studios, where they worked together on a number of projects, including Hot Wheels Turbo Racing and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. The seed for the pair's future plans was sown when they collaborated on the Xbox boat combat game Blood Wake, which shipped in 2001.

"There were a bunch of water games that came out around that time, but especially Wave Race 64 and the first Hydro Thunder were big inspirations," Small recalled of Blood Wake's development. "About three years ago, we started talking about we wanted to do another boat racing game, and it all came together when we decided to start our own company and quit our jobs."

So in December 2007, Knoesel quit his job at Stormfront, Small quit his job at Electronic Arts, where he had transitioned, and the following month Vector Unit was born.

Origins of the Project

"I've always really been a fan of water games," Small told us. "I love the dynamic of being able to race on a field that's changing all the time."

"I think there originally were doubts as to whether you could make a game that was fast-paced enough on water, because boats tend to be slower than cars," he added, "but [1999's] Hydro Thunder showed you could make a really fast-paced racing game on a water surface and still have the water feel believable."

That love of the genre led Small and Knoesel to begin working on a boat racing prototype in 2008, before any publisher or license had been secured. In addition to their experience with Blood Wake, Knoesel's own background helped considerably.

"Ralf has a physics education, studying aerospace and fluid dynamics in school, and he came up with a water-based engine and built a combat boat game around that," Small said. "We were totally self-funded, and we spent the first six months or so working on our tools and our game engine, and coming up with a prototype for the boat racing game."

Armed with a core game, Vector Unit starting shopping the unnamed project around, and Microsoft expressed interest. After some discussion, "the idea of attaching it to Hydro Thunder came up," and Microsoft licensed the property from Midway, whose assets have since been acquired by Warner Bros.

The Evolution

Along with the new name, Hydro Thunder Hurricane, Vector Unit continued to modify its underlying mechanics, to fit both the license and the pair's own intuition.

"The original prototype was a little more sim-like," said Small. "There's this one particular feel, and you know it when you feel it on the controller, of the boat rocking over water -- when you're going over the water, you can carve into the slopes of the waves."

One of the key elements of a water-based game is believably selling players the notion that they are navigating through water, but one of the key elements of an arcade racer is maintaining high speeds and exaggerated mechanics, and those two necessities can be at odds.

"It's an interesting balancing act," said Small, discussing that conflict. "If you start going really, really fast, you start bouncing over the waves, and you lose the sense of digging into the water."

"We started with something pretty realistic, and then we spent a lot of time proving that we could crank the speeds up to 200 miles per hour and still have the boats straddle that line," he went on. "It's a question of keeping the realistic parts of the physics that feel good, like carving into the wave, and playing with downforce and dampening the buoyancy so that when you start going fast you don't get out of control."

Running the Studio

Hydro Thunder Hurricane has now been in full production for a little over a year, and Vector Unit plans to ship the game for Xbox Live Arcade this summer.

Small says that while developing a game with a core team of two plus a few contractors has been a big change from his days with large teams at Stormfront and Electronic Arts, there have been surprisingly few hitches, and the ability to operate in many roles has been mostly welcome.

"Some of my time was spent managing the contractors and the outsourcers, and doing a bit of art direction, but I got to get my hands in and do a lot of the modeling for the boats and tracks," Small said. "Ralf's title is technical director, but he programmed all the basic water physics."

Overall, he estimated, "you get to choose at least 80 percent of the time which hats you wear, and then sometimes you end up forced into wearing a particular hat."

The biggest challenge? Everyone on the team is critical. "With a big team, if somebody catches the flu and is out for a week or two, it's not that big a deal," Small explained. "One thing that caught us off guard is that when you have three artists on the team and one of them is out for a couple weeks, your production for the month can drop by half."

Thriving with a small team has largely been a product of maintaining focus, he said. He stressed the importance of "stripping out the stuff people expect in bigger games, like cinematics or elaborate scripted set pieces, and focusing on the core of the experience -- which, here, is the racing, the physics, the interaction with the other boats."

"Once you have the core engine and physics," he added, "you realize what parts of the game are surprising and fun, and you can find different ways of capitalizing on them."

Damn the Torpedoes is back! (exclusive image)

You might've seen the announcement last week about Hydro Thunder Hurricane come to Xbox Live Arcade this summer, bringing all the fun and excitement of the classic Midway arcade racer in a whole new light.  Well, we recently had a chance to chat with Matt Small, the co-founder and creative director for the team at Vector Unit, who are currently at work on the game.  We uncovered a lot of stuff, such as why the team opted to do a sequel instead of an arcade port and how great it would be to try their hand at San Francisco Rush.  (Work on it, Microsoft!)

Q: What prompted Vector Unit to work on a Hydro Thunder sequel?  Were you just playing the original back on the Dreamcast (or in the arcade) and saying, "Hey, a sequel to this would be awesome" or what?  What was the inspiration?

Matt: We're big fans of water racing games generally -- the original HT and Wave Race 64 in particular.  We also come from a watery background -- Ralf and I both led the team that developed Blood Wake on the original Xbox.  So when we started Vector Unit two years ago, we decided to kick the company off with a new speedboat racing game that captures the spirit of those old games, with the addition of all the amazing new things that you can do with water physics on new consoles like the 360.

The first game demo we made was an original speedboat racing game.  The demo showed off the game's controls and our new fluid dynamic system.  Microsoft was interested, and through talks with them the idea came up of making this a full-featured sequel to the original Hydro Thunder.  

Word of advice: go around.

How did you go about getting the rights to the game?  Through Warner Bros. Interactive (the owners of Midway assets) or by another means?  And how did they feel about the idea of a Hydro Thunder sequel?

Matt: Microsoft Game Studios (MGS) acquired the rights from Midway just before the company was acquired by Warner.  Our main contact at Warner now is actually a guy who came over from Midway and worked on the original HT.  So far the response from them has been really positive.

Q: The tracks we saw in the trailer look very much inspired by the original.  What new tricks are you including to knock players' socks off?

Matt: Aside from the core game mechanics, the most important aspect we wanted to capture from the original HT was the crazy over the top theme-park environments.  Of course there are the huge drop offs, secret shortcuts and unexpected surprises, but there's also this heavily themed, storytelling quality to it, like you're on some crazy ride at an amusement park.  For each track we came up with a kind of story that the track tells, leading up to some kind of crazy climax as you draw close to the finish line.  That was key to capturing the feel of the original game.

But of course we also wanted to bring something new to the game.  I'd say the main new element is the interactive, dynamic water surface.  Everything in the game affects the water as you're driving over it -- the other boats leave physical wakes, whirlpools and waves disrupt the surface, and triggerable elements like avalanches and explosions create these huge waves that toss the boats around. Because of all that stuff, the racing experience is a little bit different each time you race a track.

Q: Why work on an entirely different game, rather than porting over the original?  Wouldn't the original Hydro Thunder have done well on Xbox Live with online play?  Or is the possibility still there?

Matt: We considered going that route, but it's been a long time since the original game, and the 360 is capable of so much more than the hardware was back in the day.  We were going to have to rebuild all the art from scratch anyway, so we figured -- why not give fans something new rather than just have them replay the original with nicer graphics?

"Anyone bring the bug spray?"

Q: How did you go about putting the tracks together?  Did you consult anyone from the original Hydro Thunder team, or do it all from scratch? 

Matt: Midway did give us code and assets from the original game, and we used some of it as reference, but everything in HTH is built from scratch.  Of course, we went back and played the heck out of the original game to refresh our memories, and really studied all the maps and FAQs we could get our hands on, to try and understand as deeply as possible all the things that made the original game great.  

Q: How much work went into the game's water effects?  They look like they have a huge effect on gameplay.

Matt: The physical simulation of the water, and the way the boats move on the water, was one of the very first things we focused on.  It was important to us to prove out early that we could add more interaction and dynamism to the water while still maintaining the speed and excitement of the original game. Most of the engineering effort during the prototype phase of the game was
focused on that.  

For example, there's a realtime hull simulation running throughout the game, that actually simulates the way the water surface moves across the shape of the different boat hulls.  So the V hulled boats cut through the waves, the flat bottomed boats like Banshee hydroplane on top of the water and drift around corners, the multi-hulled boats like Thresher and Cutthroat grip the water more.  We really wanted the different boats to have unique personalities, to interact in interesting ways with the water.
 
How many tracks are in Hydro Thunder Hurricane in all?  Is there a particular favorite of the team's?

Matt: There will be 8 all new tracks with HTH.  One of them -- Lake Powell -- is artistically inspired from the original game, but the layout and the story that it tells is all new.  

It's hard to pick a favorite -- I'd say currently one of our favorites it Monster Island.  It's this beautiful tropical level with beaches and ancient
temples -- and dinosaurs.  It's one of the 3 circuit tracks in the game (the other 5 tracks are point to point tracks).  On Monster Island, every time you take a lap the water level in the middle of the island drops, so each lap you have to take a different path around the giant temple complex in there.  It's really great in multiplayer, and it has lots of unique water interactions, like a swimming Tylosaur that jumps out of the water and makes this huge splash you can jump off.

How important was it to include online play through Xbox Live?  It's good to see Hydro finally playable against others without the need for split-screen.  For that matter, is split-screen also included, just in case?

Matt: Online was absolutely a primary goal for us from the beginning.  We've spend a lot of time getting the feel of it right, and we've gotten it to the point where you can play with 8 people online, and the control feels very tight and lag-free (depending on your internet connection of course).  

We also have support for up to 4 players in split screen.  On top of that, you can play split screen and online together in any combination -- so for instance you could have up to 4 players playing locally and 4 more online.  

Finally, in addition to racing, there's a new multiplayer game mode called "Rubber Ducky."  It's a team game, inspired by the Mini vs Enzo game people play in PGR.  Each team has one person driving a Rubber Duck and the rest driving faster boats -- the goal is to protect your duck, slam the other team's duck, and be the first team to get your duck across the finish line.

You could definitely consider these speed bumps.

Will a lot of the boat models from the original game make a return here, or are they all new boats?

Matt: 8 or the 9 boats from the original game are making a comeback.  They're all redesigned, but they're all recognizable -- Razorback, Tidal Blade, Rad Hazard.  In addition to creating new models and textures with a lot of new detail, each boat has multiple skins so you don't have to all look the same online.  Plus there are new transformation animations when you acquire boost; we tried to really punch those up to make them even more dramatic, with lots of engine parts and rockets and stuff unfolding out from hidden compartments.

Q: If Hurricane does big numbers for Xbox Live (and we can't see why it wouldn't), could Vector Unit possibly work on other franchise sequels, such as San Francisco Rush?

Matt: We don't have any definite plans for that yet, but I have to say I would relish the chance to take a crack at SF Rush.  I think the time is ripe for a return of the over the top arcade racer -- I love racing games, and there just haven't been enough of those crazy colorful over the top shortcut driven games lately.

Q: Finally, has anyone played H2Overdrive yet?  That was kind of a "spiritual" sequel to Hydro Thunder that came out in arcades last year.  And if you have, did that push you to try and make Hurricane a better game?

Matt: Unfortunately I haven't had a chance to play H2Overdrive yet.  None of the local arcades have it,  and believe me I would love to check it out.  But we watched all the videos and have read what we can about it.  Watching those videos definitely inspired us to try and cram even more animated surprises and insane set-pieces into our game.

Thanks to Matt for taking the time to talk to us.  Look for a Hydro Thunder Hurricane preview soon, and check out the game when it arrives this summer.  If you miss it, "you're crazy"!