Decima

Decima engine display

The Decima engine is a game engine developed primarily by Guerrilla Games, and improved upon by Kojima Productions. It is currently optimized for PlayStation 4 system software and powers Death Stranding.

History

Initially, the game engine did not have a name when it was used to power Killzone: Shadow Fall. In June 2015, Guerrilla announced that their new action RPG Horizon Zero Dawn would use a slightly modified version of the Killzone: Shadow Fall engine. The same year, in August, a version of the engine modified with Havok physics was used for the game developed by Supermassive Games, Until Dawn. In December, Until Dawn's PlayStationVR spin-off, Until Dawn: Rush of Blood, again used the same engine.

The box Guerrilla Games gifted Kojima, containing their engine's source code

Following its abrupt separation from Konami and subsequent reformation in late 2015, Kojima Productions was left without a game engine of its own, as Konami retained rights to the studio's Fox Engine. Guerrilla Games was one of the first studios Hideo Kojima visited during his tech tour in search of a new game engine. As a gesture of goodwill, Guerrilla gifted Kojima with a box containing the source code of their then-unnamed in-house engine, with no contractual obligations attached at the time.

What began as a friendly gesture soon developed into an intense collaborative effort. Realizing the engine needed to be altered to accommodate the starkly different world of Death Stranding, Kojima had his team improve on its code base and send their updates to Guerrilla. This led to the installation of a Kojima satellite team at Guerrilla, to further facilitate collaboration between the two studios in the advancement of the engine. As a result of this Dutch–Japanese development, the engine was coined "Decima", named after the Japanese island of Dejima – the location of a Dutch trading post in the 17th century – in homage to the Netherlands' long-standing trading ties with Japan.

At The Game Awards 2016, Kojima showcased his studio's usage of Decima through a Death Stranding teaser trailer, which featured a logo entitled "Decima" at the end. On December 3, Kojima and Guerrilla Games director Hermen Hulst publicly announced the joint effort between their studios during a PSX 2016 panel discussion: "We have people from an entirely different background that have worked on a different set of projects adding to the code base and to the ideas and that we can share again with the entire team back in Amsterdam."

Capabilities

A Decima-generated version of a meeting room, coined the "Glass Room"

Decima houses frameworks for scripting artificial intelligence, creating dynamic physics, generating logics and a tool suite for developing entire game worlds. The engine additionally supports physically based rendering and volumetric entities, with significant changes implemented for its use in rendering the world of Death Stranding. Kojima Productions and Guerrilla Games' collaboration has lead to constant wide-ranging improvements being made to the engine and circulated between the two studios.

Games

• Killzone: Shadow Fall (2013)
• Until Dawn (2015)
• RIGS: Mechanized Combat League (2016)
• Horizon Zero Dawn (2017)
• Death Stranding (2019)
• Horizon Forbidden West (2022)
• Death Stranding 2 (TBA)

Notes

• Hermen Hulst also mentioned Decima, the Roman goddess of childbirth, as an influence on the engine's chosen name, due specifically to her relationship with creativity.