Double Fine's Kiln: A Multiplayer Game Where You Design Your Own Character

Double Fine launched Kiln this week on PS5, Xbox, and PC. It's the studio's first competitive multiplayer game since Microsoft bought the company in 2019. The core idea is straightforward: two teams of four players each compete in water-based combat, with a twist — you sculpt your own character class using a virtual pottery wheel before each match.

Here's how it works. You control a floating spirit that inhabits a clay pot. The shape of your pot determines how it plays. A tall, narrow vessel might hold more water but break more easily. A wide, sturdy pot might be slower but tougher to destroy. Before each match, you can bring three custom pots and switch between them when you respawn after being defeated.

The Pottery Wheel as Character Design

The pottery system is Kiln's main draw. You sit at a virtual pottery wheel and shape clay using real pottery techniques — centering it, pulling up the walls, shaping the overall form. The final geometry directly affects your stats in combat: water capacity, durability, damage output. Different pot designs could fill different roles on a team — one player makes a defensive pot, another makes an offensive one, a third designs something built for speed.

This approach opens up creative possibilities. Teams could coordinate their pot designs to work together, or players could experiment and discover unexpected combinations that give them an edge.

How Matches Work

Kiln has multiple levels with moving parts — rotating boats, conveyor belts, disco floors — that change how you position yourself during combat. Matches are fast-paced, with players respawning just seconds after they're defeated, keeping the action constant.

Right now there's one game mode: extinguish the enemy's fire by throwing water at their kiln. No alternate rulesets or objective types at launch. This focus on doing one thing well is common in multiplayer games these days, especially at launch.

Why This Matters for Double Fine

Double Fine has made a notable shift. The studio is known for single-player story games like Psychonauts and Grim Fandango. Kiln is their first major move into competitive multiplayer.

This kind of shift happens often after a studio is acquired by a larger company. Microsoft owns Double Fine now, and Microsoft benefits from multiplayer games — they're stickier than single-player games, they keep people playing longer, and they work well with Game Pass, Microsoft's subscription service. The games that keep players engaged are the ones that make subscriptions valuable.

What's interesting is that Double Fine didn't make Kiln exclusive to Xbox. It's launching on PlayStation and PC too. Microsoft owns the studio, but it's choosing to reach as many players as possible rather than lock it to its own platform. We've seen this before with Minecraft and other big acquisitions — if a game already has players across multiple platforms, it makes more sense to stay everywhere rather than consolidate.

The Technical Side

Making a pottery wheel work in a multiplayer game is no small engineering feat. The game has to let you sculpt clay in real-time, then instantly translate that shape into gameplay values and physics. It also has to prevent players from creating broken designs that give unfair advantages — there are invisible constraints built in to keep things balanced.

The fast respawns and short matches suggest the servers are built for speed, not for maintaining a persistent world that evolves over time. That's the right choice for competitive play; it makes matchmaking simpler and keeps everyone on an equal footing.

The pottery technology Double Fine built here — the tools for deforming geometry in real-time, generating stats from shape, building creation systems that feed into gameplay — could show up in future Double Fine projects. Creative tools like this tend to accumulate value over time.

The Challenge Ahead

Kiln is entering a space already crowded with successful games: Overwatch 2, Valorant, Apex Legends. Those titles have millions of players and years of polish. The pottery mechanic is genuinely different, but different alone doesn't guarantee success.

The broader context here is that Double Fine is betting on whether its existing fans — people who love its story-driven, artistic games — will also enjoy competitive multiplayer. That's a real unknown. The art direction and accessible controls suggest the studio is aiming beyond hardcore esports players, toward people who want creative expression alongside competition. Whether that audience exists in large enough numbers remains to be seen.

Success for Kiln will likely depend on three things: regular updates that add new content, an active community that keeps improving, and refinement of the pottery system based on how players actually use it. For any multiplayer game, the weeks after launch matter more than launch day itself.