From the surreal subconscious landscapes of Psychonauts to a game centered entirely on a walking, talking lighthouse, Double Fine Productions has carved out a reputation for turning peculiar ideas into compelling interactive experiences. This tradition continues with their latest project, Kiln, a game that frames its entire design around a creative act often associated with quiet, meditative craft: pottery. But here, the pots become warriors, and the pottery wheel is the forge for unique player characters destined for chaotic, objective-driven online battles.
At its core, Kiln is a game about tangible consequences. Players aren’t just crafting a vase for aesthetic pleasure; they are architecting a combatant. The shape you pull from the spinning clay determines your vessel’s movement speed, attack method, water capacity, and tactical niche. A wide, shallow bowl might scuttle quickly and hold a vast reservoir of liquid, while a tall, narrow amphora could possess a powerful ranged splash attack but move with deliberate slowness. Every pinch, pull, and press on the wheel is a direct decision in gameplay stat allocation, blurring the line between player expression and strategic loadout.
From Prototype to Pottery Paradigm
Kiln’s journey began not in a design document, but during one of Double Fine’s famous ‘Amnesia Fortnight’ sessions, where developers step away from their main projects to prototype wild ideas. The initial concept was exactly that: wild. A quick-and-dirty assembly of code that proved players could, in fact, form clay on a virtual wheel. It was, as lead designer Lauren Scott describes, “a few lines of code stacked together in a trench coat.” It was a charming proof of concept, but it lacked the crucial element that would define the final game: the pot’s shape had no gameplay impact.
“We wanted to make sure that the shape that you made on the wheel mattered,” Scott says. For the transition from tech demo to full-scale project, this became the central, multi-layered challenge. The team needed to create a cohesive design language where every curve, width, and height of a player’s creation could be translated into a predictable and balanced set of in-game capabilities. This required building a systemic bridge from creative tool to combat sandbox.
The character and animation team, led by Jared Mill, tackled this by methodically cataloging the possibilities. They charted out every major pottery archetype – from plates and cups to bottles and amphorae – considering their inherent personalities. A squat, sturdy jug might feel hardy and resilient, while a delicate, fluted vase could be nimble and evasive. “Then we built their animation set and their proportions and the entire character around that personality,” Mill explains. This foundational work ensured that the feeling of a shape matched its function, with 24 distinct pottery types offering a wide spectrum of playstyles.
The Collision Conundrum of Infinite Shapes
With a system predicated on infinite customization within defined archetypes, a major technical hurdle emerged: how do you handle consistent, fair collision detection when no two player characters are geometrically identical? An early approach mapped hitboxes precisely to the bespoke geometry of each pot. This seemed logical, offering pure simulation, but it created unpredictable and often frustrating player interactions in the fast-paced multiplayer environment.
The solution, arrived at after extensive iteration, embraced simplification in service of clarity. The game now analyzes a finished pot, taking its widest point and its tallest point, and generates a simplified cylindrical collision capsule. This “capsule collision” system provides the essential gameplay feel: a short, wide plate can slide under a low obstacle, while a tall, thin bottle cannot. It respects the player’s creative intent without bogging down the combat with finicky, pixel-perfect collision that would be impossible to read in the heat of a match. The design shifted from simulating a pot’s *exact* physical presence to simulating its *functional* physical presence.
The Art of Clay: Authenticity vs. Playability
In pursuit of authenticity, many of the developers, including Scott and Mill, took actual pottery classes. This immersion provided invaluable insight into the tactile reality of clay, but it also revealed a critical tension in game design. Real pottery is a messy, demanding, and often frustrating craft where success can collapse in an instant. The initial version of Kiln’s pottery wheel leaned heavily into this simulation, replicating the delicate friction of pulling up a wall of clay, the danger of forming holes, and the risk of a wobbly collapse.
Image via Double Fine/Microsoft
This approach created what Scott calls “too much friction.” While realistic, it was antithetical to the “player fantasy” at the heart of the game – the empowering feeling of being an expert potter who can quickly manifest their vision. The goal was not to simulate the struggle of a beginner, but the mastery of a creator. The team consciously pulled back from hardcore simulation towards a more forgiving, fluid experience. “We went in real hard on the simulation side and then we pulled back to the player fantasy side,” Scott notes. The result is a pottery system that retains the core physical language of centering clay, opening the form, and pulling walls, but streamlines and assists the process to make it consistently rewarding and accessible within the game’s limited creation window.
The Pull of the Wheel: Pacing a Two-Phase Game
This frictionless creation system, however, introduced a new, unexpected design dilemma: it was too much fun. During playtesting, developers observed players becoming so engrossed in refining their pots on the wheel that they were reluctant to join the ongoing match. The creative sandbox threatened to overshadow the multiplayer combat it was designed to fuel. “We lived for a long time with that tension,” Scott says, “players wanting to spend time on the wheel making a pot, but that then eats into their match time, so they’re feeling this pressure of getting off of the wheel.”
Initially, players could only create a new pot from scratch during a match, a mechanic that highlighted this tension starkly. The team needed systems that would respect the desire for creative tinkering while firmly nudging players toward the primary objective-based combat.
The ‘Top Shelf’ System: A Library of Living Loadouts
The primary solution to this pacing problem is the introduction of the “Top Shelf” system, a conceptual breakthrough that elegantly marries creation with combat readiness. Instead of being a one-and-done forge, the pottery wheel becomes a workshop for building an arsenal. Players create pots at their leisure outside of high-pressure matches, storing favorites in a personalized collection. This library then becomes accessible during a match, allowing players to swap their current vessel for another pre-made design if a situation demands a different tactical approach.
This system effectively decouples the creative, time-consuming act of sculpting from the moment-to-moment gameplay decisions. It functions similarly to the hero-swapping mechanics in team-based shooters like Overwatch, but with a uniquely personal twist. The “Top Shelf” isn’t a menu of pre-defined characters; it’s a curated gallery of your own creations. If your tall, rangy jar is struggling in a close-quarters control point, you can swiftly switch to a low, durable pot you previously shaped for brawling. It respects player agency and strategic forethought while eliminating the pressure to build under fire.
To further ensure the focus stays on combat during the match, the team made another deliberate simplification: decorative painting is reserved for the workshop. While players can decorate and glaze their creations to stunning visual effect, this process is confined to the dedicated creation space. During a match, your pot’s visual identity is locked. This might seem like a limitation, but it’s a crucial piece of cognitive load management. By removing the option to decorate mid-fight, the game gently but firmly guides the player’s attention toward movement, positioning, ability use, and teamwork—the core verbs of the battle.
Image via Double Fine/Xbox
Designing a New Language of Play
Ultimately, Kiln represents a fascinating exercise in designing a completely new gameplay grammar from the ground up. It’s not a traditional class-based shooter with a skin-deep crafting mini-game attached. The act of creation *is* the class selection, the stat distribution, and the character customization, all unified in a single, coherent, tactile interaction. The challenge for Double Fine was to build intuitive systems around this novel core, solving problems that don’t exist in conventional genre templates.
From developing capsule collision for infinite forms to calibrating the pottery simulation between frustrating realism and empowering fantasy, and finally to architecting the “Top Shelf” system to resolve the inherent tension between creation and combat, each step required questioning standard assumptions. The goal was always to ensure that the player’s emotional and strategic investment in the pot they crafted was honored and reflected in every splash, dash, and clash on the battlefield. The success of Kiln rests on this seamless, meaningful connection—a connection forged not just in a digital kiln, but in thoughtful systems design that makes every pinch of clay count.
