#water physics

Games that focus themselves on water end up with really fluid, heavy-feeling animations that feel complex and real. There's so much going on in that texture up top, and the background color manipulation is a traditional way to make us feel underwater. Make it blue, give us a gradient to add this seemingly endless depth. It takes a lot of work!

Kirby games get a huge spotlight here because there's barely any animation or background manipulation at all. That texture up top must be 3 or 4 frames at most, and the option to not change the color of the background gives us this illusion that we're looking at crystal-clear water. Don't you just wanna take a sip??

(source of image) And then we have the opposite end the spectrum, where the animation is just incredibly complicated and must have used some sort of rendering program to make the water animate that way onto the background, yoshi, and mario. Just so cool. I have no idea how the SNES could handle Yoshi's Island with all that stuff going on.

(source of image) Then when you dive into the 3D waters, new tricks (& variations of old ones) arrive to give us the same illusion. There are plenty of early n64 and playstation games that just use the 1-texture-and-slowly-move-it-over-empty-space trick. Which doesn't look bad!! I really love how the simple trick really makes it look like moving water without using up a bunch of memory trying to animate heavy, fluid water like in games more focused on water environments like Wave Race or Chrono Cross.

Then, with the advent of the gamecube and new methods of animating in 3 dimensions, Wind Waker kind of takes the cake in water animation for me. Cell-shading absolutely everything in the environment somehow makes the water look like the most realistic thing on screen. It uses simple tricks with highlights and shadows depending on the movement and speed of the water and it's simply beautiful. It's obviously not on-the-nose realistic water you'd find in games like Uncharted or Tomb Raider, but for what it's worth it's so satisfying to look at and somehow totally believable to me. Even in the more realistic games, you are free to walk up very close and see the animation seams in the rivers and shores. But in Wind Waker, it's coded to always look good. Other special mentions and shout outs are all the games on Snes which animated water usin' Mode 7. Any water or beach themed games like Dead or Alive XTreme, Final Fantasy X, Ecco, Wave Races, Subnautica, Bioshock, etc. I forgot to mention Super Mario Sunshine simply set a new standard in how 3d rendered water physics oughtta work.

So essentially my answer is: Favorite video game waters are the ones that are the most ingenious about animating it. Wind Waker, Yoshi's Island, and I specifically love the water in Paper Mario & Kirby Air Ride. Crisp 2-D animated water in 3-D environments is another challenge that yields some really satisfying results. Me and my brother also used to think the Mario Golf/Wii Golf water animations were something to behold. That memory was a driving inspiration behind making this blog in the first place. Thanks so much for asking!!! This was really fun to explore. I'm not doing much research beyond what I've seen and played personally, so if I'm missing on big details it's simply because I'm unaware of them! So please reach out and talk to me about this!! Always more to discover under the sea...