Post by Lord Ba'al on May 13, 2014 18:58:14 GMT
Peter Molyneux
Hello there. My name is Peter Molyneux, this is Jack Attridge and we’re the designers on Project Godus which is being kickstarted at this very moment in time. This is one of five updates that we’re doing. We’re going to cover inspiration from other games, what features we’ve decided upon, we’re going to cover single player, multiplayer and we’re going to discover all the advanced features by day five. And we’re going to start off on day one by looking at some of the old games that I’ve done before. We’re going back in time 20 years and look at Populous, Dungeon Keeper and Black & White and we’re going to steal the best bits and throw away the worst bits. It’s going to be a bit emotional for me because it’s like going back in time remembering all those things. Hopefully by the end of these videos you’ll have an exact idea of what is going through our mind in Project Godus. So, first Jack let’s look at Populous. We’ve played some multi player games haven’t we?
Jack Attridge
Lost multiplayer. Yeah, I’m rubbish.
Peter Molyneux
You hated it at the start didn’t you?
Jack Attridge
I just didn’t know what was going on and you were much better than me.
Peter Molyneux
Well, you’re never going to beat me. I’m the creator of it. I’ve always had this rule, when you’re making multi player games, keep on adding rules until you win.
Jack Attridge
I also didn’t like… Everything is based on energy, I mean everything, so if you end up smashing I just have no way of coming back out of it.
Peter Molyneux
Well, you know, if you’re going to beat someone you’re going to beat them into a pulp.
Jack Attridge
Well I don’t want to sit around watching you…
Peter Molyneux
Well, that’s true. Balance is one thing. Let’s have a look at the fundamentals of Populous. So, what was Populous? Populous was the first god game and the thing I loved about it was this slight feeling of a living world which kind of evolved in front of you which you could influence. And let’s have a look at that now… How did we get into this? Oh no… Right! Here we are in the lovely world of Populous. Firstly and foremostly, good grief it’s dated badly hasn’t it? Look at that. It’s, you know, it’s a horrible isometric… At the time these were pretty astounding graphics.
Jack Attridge
Is that a little person?
Peter Molyneux
That is a little person yes. Two frames of animation, two dots for his eyes and one dot for his mouth. Let’s look at the principle of this because I… although this is horribly flawed, I still love this bit, the raising and lowering of land. Raising and lowering the land kind of makes you feel powerful. You know what Jack, it’s all about power. For me the game Godus is all about power. It’s all about doing things which influence the land and the feeling of power that you have as a god. And I still love this idea of raising and lowering the land. It’s quite a relaxing thing to do isn’t it? It’s something that you quite enjoy doing, making something flat and clear, but behind all of that there is strategy going on, because across the other side of the landscape of course there is the evil player, when we were playing multi player that was you, who’s also spreading out. So… The rules are simple. Raise and lower the land. You make flat land. Your people spread out onto the flat land. The more people spread out the more mana, we used to call it mana, you get and the more of this mana you’ve got the more god powers you can use. So, we’re definitely going to keep raising and lowering. Anything else from here that you like?
Jack Attridge
I love the kind of OCD feeling of cleaning up when you’re raising and lowering. But as a contrast to that, where it’s kind of a dated game now is the fact that the raising and the lowering of the land kind of feels very mechanical.
Peter Molyneux
Yes it does.
Jack Attridge
It doesn’t hide the seems. I want to be able to incrementally change the land. I want to really feel in control of that.
Peter Molyneux
Yes. Yes. And we want this land to be more than just land. We want the land to have streams and rivers and life and vegetation and rocks and rubble all of which you can interact with. So, this is our first design decision. We’re going to have sculpting the land.
Jack Attridge
Sculpting.
Peter Molyneux
And what sculpting means is adjusting the land, the ability to make little hills and the little hills to become mountains and those mountains to become huge mountains. Also the ability to lower the land, sculpt it down, the ability to lower mountains. The rule is, when there’s a flat piece of land the little people will settle. Also we’re going to have cleaning up, as you say. Tapping with the mouse or tapping with your finger on mobile starts that clearing process and also enables something else. So that’s what we’re going to take and we’re also going to take god powers as well. Shall we move on to another game?
Jack Attridge
Well. My other thing… What I want is that… You see these little people around the landscape? It’s like that guy is supposed to be like 30 guys. I mean I want to see armies…
Peter Molyneux
You’re right. It was rubbish wasn’t it?
Jack Attridge
I want to see civilization.
Peter Molyneux
Yes. Yes. We can, and again this is something which we’re prototyping at the moment, Fabs out there is prototyping it, we’re hoping to have that prototype out as soon as possible. We want a landscape that is beautiful, that you can sculpt and that has got a feeling of population.
Jack Attridge
I want to see those little guys not just hiding in the houses but living around it you know brushing up the doorstep. It’s quite of a feeling of life.
Peter Molyneux
Yes! Yes! That’s the living world isn’t it! So our pillar is the living world and in that living world having mass population and then when your people battle against my people or my people battle against a god in single player… it’s a whole army! It’s a population that we want. Now, we’re talking to those guys about what that means. Can we fit hundreds on screen? I love the Total War series. That’s what I want. That’s what I feel like as a population. Anyway, we’ve now got a list of things which we want from Populous, let’s move on to Dungeon Keeper.
Jack Attridge
Well also I want that drama from multi player still. I want to really really capture that. Because that was the great thing, it’s about getting so close to winning and the just getting smashed with a tsunami or something.
Peter Molyneux
Yeah… You never did actually win that multi player did you?
Jack Attridge
No…
Peter Molyneux
Hmmm…
Jack Attridge
Ranks matches as well.
Peter Molyneux
Well you’ve got to remember that still in Populous there’s a cheat. If I move the mouse to the top left hand side of the screen and press a certain key combination all my people would…
Jack Attridge
Do it again!
Peter Molyneux
I’m not going to show the world my cheat. It’s served me well over the years. Let’s look at Dungeon Keeper.
Jack Attridge
Okay. Cool.
Peter Molyneux
Right, here’s Dungeon Keeper. You know there is ehm… Not looking quite so dated this. I’m still really proud of Dungeon Keeper. I really love the feeling of a living world, again. You know, all these imps and creatures running around. But the one thing I want to take from Dungeon Keeper absolutely is the digging. I loved that digging. I loved the feeling of exploration and seeing those imps digging out. Even going into first person and digging for yourself. I really loved that and we’re going to steal that for Godus. So. If you remember we’re going to sculpt, push the land up, pull the land down, we’re going to clean up by tapping, but you’re also going to be digging into the landscape and revealing stuff. And the stuff I loved revealing in Dungeon Keeper were the resources, the gold and the gems. So that is one thing that we’re definitely going to take. There was this hand as well. I liked doing this. I liked slapping my imps. You can see that that was the inspiration for slapping your monkey in Black & White. So I really like this feeling of cruelty. Is that bad?
Jack Attridge
That’s in all of us I’m sure.
Peter Molyneux
Well yeah. And so, we’re going to have digging, we’re going to have sculpting but we’re also going to have a god power which is called The Finger of God. And what the finger of god will do is allow you to do little things in the world like tapping… like pushing people and tapping people and being cruel to people and picking people up. I love that feeling and sensation.
Jack Attridge
Well it’s still got to feel tactile.
Peter Molyneux
Yeah… Anything else from Dungeon Keeper? What are the bad bits?
Jack Attridge
The bad bits. Ehhhm…
Peter Molyneux
The interface is terrible again. Thousands of icons around there. The screen was still pretty small by today’s standards. So we want to have a kind of feeling of approaching an iconless game. As long as that doesn’t get in the way of the game play. Should we have a look at Black & White?
Jack Attridge
Let’s do it.
Peter Molyneux
Okay, here we are in Black & White. Now the first real thing is that we managed to get rid of a lot of that clutter in the interface so I’m definitely inspired by that. Also, it starts to look a little bit more like a real living world which is aspirational but I really want to take it that much further with Godus you know. We’re talking about a living world, the little people having an intelligence of themselves which they kind of had in Black & White. So let’s have a little look. Now the first thing is the interface of the hand moving around. It was good but it was very fiddly. Do you not think?
Jack Attridge
Yeah. Every now and then I grab onto something I don’t mean to grab onto.
Peter Molyneux
Yes. And we want to… being fiddly is something I hate. I love this ability of being able to pick things up. And you can tap on rocks and break them in half and use them as weapons, but it is incredibly fiddly. One of the beautiful things which we definitely want to try and keep is this feeling of tactile nature of the world. So have a look at how that grass moves as you move your hand around. Now that’s a little point but for me it makes the world more tangible and real. I also love the idea of being able to kind of interact with your people a little bit. What about you Jack? What are your favourite… what are the best bits and the worst bits?
Jack Attridge
For me it’s a sense of scale that I want to capture, you know. I mean Populous is very kind of locked off and I really want to be up in the clouds one moment and I really want to feel like I’m seeing the damage very kind of magnified the next.
Peter Molyneux
So, in summary, a very quick rush through all the games. We’re going to have the sculpting of the land from Black & White. We’re going to have the digging and the feeling of a little intelligence from the creatures in Dungeon Keeper. And we’re going to have the tactile nature of the world from Black & White along with the beauty and the feeling of being able to spread your godly influence around. That forms the basis of our mechanics in Black & White. And tomorrow we’re going to talk about single player and multi player and how we are going to use those mechanics and we’re also going to be starting to look at some of the very early prototypes that we’re doing. And! And this is the key thing about Kickstarter, we’re going to have to look at what people think of this video. If they don’t agree with things and it’s sensible, that should be incorporated in its design.
Jack Attridge
Absolutely. There’s no point doing a Kickstarter if we’re not listening.
Peter Molyneux
That is the whole point. It is the whole point. Great! Thank you very much.
Hello there. My name is Peter Molyneux, this is Jack Attridge and we’re the designers on Project Godus which is being kickstarted at this very moment in time. This is one of five updates that we’re doing. We’re going to cover inspiration from other games, what features we’ve decided upon, we’re going to cover single player, multiplayer and we’re going to discover all the advanced features by day five. And we’re going to start off on day one by looking at some of the old games that I’ve done before. We’re going back in time 20 years and look at Populous, Dungeon Keeper and Black & White and we’re going to steal the best bits and throw away the worst bits. It’s going to be a bit emotional for me because it’s like going back in time remembering all those things. Hopefully by the end of these videos you’ll have an exact idea of what is going through our mind in Project Godus. So, first Jack let’s look at Populous. We’ve played some multi player games haven’t we?
Jack Attridge
Lost multiplayer. Yeah, I’m rubbish.
Peter Molyneux
You hated it at the start didn’t you?
Jack Attridge
I just didn’t know what was going on and you were much better than me.
Peter Molyneux
Well, you’re never going to beat me. I’m the creator of it. I’ve always had this rule, when you’re making multi player games, keep on adding rules until you win.
Jack Attridge
I also didn’t like… Everything is based on energy, I mean everything, so if you end up smashing I just have no way of coming back out of it.
Peter Molyneux
Well, you know, if you’re going to beat someone you’re going to beat them into a pulp.
Jack Attridge
Well I don’t want to sit around watching you…
Peter Molyneux
Well, that’s true. Balance is one thing. Let’s have a look at the fundamentals of Populous. So, what was Populous? Populous was the first god game and the thing I loved about it was this slight feeling of a living world which kind of evolved in front of you which you could influence. And let’s have a look at that now… How did we get into this? Oh no… Right! Here we are in the lovely world of Populous. Firstly and foremostly, good grief it’s dated badly hasn’t it? Look at that. It’s, you know, it’s a horrible isometric… At the time these were pretty astounding graphics.
Jack Attridge
Is that a little person?
Peter Molyneux
That is a little person yes. Two frames of animation, two dots for his eyes and one dot for his mouth. Let’s look at the principle of this because I… although this is horribly flawed, I still love this bit, the raising and lowering of land. Raising and lowering the land kind of makes you feel powerful. You know what Jack, it’s all about power. For me the game Godus is all about power. It’s all about doing things which influence the land and the feeling of power that you have as a god. And I still love this idea of raising and lowering the land. It’s quite a relaxing thing to do isn’t it? It’s something that you quite enjoy doing, making something flat and clear, but behind all of that there is strategy going on, because across the other side of the landscape of course there is the evil player, when we were playing multi player that was you, who’s also spreading out. So… The rules are simple. Raise and lower the land. You make flat land. Your people spread out onto the flat land. The more people spread out the more mana, we used to call it mana, you get and the more of this mana you’ve got the more god powers you can use. So, we’re definitely going to keep raising and lowering. Anything else from here that you like?
Jack Attridge
I love the kind of OCD feeling of cleaning up when you’re raising and lowering. But as a contrast to that, where it’s kind of a dated game now is the fact that the raising and the lowering of the land kind of feels very mechanical.
Peter Molyneux
Yes it does.
Jack Attridge
It doesn’t hide the seems. I want to be able to incrementally change the land. I want to really feel in control of that.
Peter Molyneux
Yes. Yes. And we want this land to be more than just land. We want the land to have streams and rivers and life and vegetation and rocks and rubble all of which you can interact with. So, this is our first design decision. We’re going to have sculpting the land.
Jack Attridge
Sculpting.
Peter Molyneux
And what sculpting means is adjusting the land, the ability to make little hills and the little hills to become mountains and those mountains to become huge mountains. Also the ability to lower the land, sculpt it down, the ability to lower mountains. The rule is, when there’s a flat piece of land the little people will settle. Also we’re going to have cleaning up, as you say. Tapping with the mouse or tapping with your finger on mobile starts that clearing process and also enables something else. So that’s what we’re going to take and we’re also going to take god powers as well. Shall we move on to another game?
Jack Attridge
Well. My other thing… What I want is that… You see these little people around the landscape? It’s like that guy is supposed to be like 30 guys. I mean I want to see armies…
Peter Molyneux
You’re right. It was rubbish wasn’t it?
Jack Attridge
I want to see civilization.
Peter Molyneux
Yes. Yes. We can, and again this is something which we’re prototyping at the moment, Fabs out there is prototyping it, we’re hoping to have that prototype out as soon as possible. We want a landscape that is beautiful, that you can sculpt and that has got a feeling of population.
Jack Attridge
I want to see those little guys not just hiding in the houses but living around it you know brushing up the doorstep. It’s quite of a feeling of life.
Peter Molyneux
Yes! Yes! That’s the living world isn’t it! So our pillar is the living world and in that living world having mass population and then when your people battle against my people or my people battle against a god in single player… it’s a whole army! It’s a population that we want. Now, we’re talking to those guys about what that means. Can we fit hundreds on screen? I love the Total War series. That’s what I want. That’s what I feel like as a population. Anyway, we’ve now got a list of things which we want from Populous, let’s move on to Dungeon Keeper.
Jack Attridge
Well also I want that drama from multi player still. I want to really really capture that. Because that was the great thing, it’s about getting so close to winning and the just getting smashed with a tsunami or something.
Peter Molyneux
Yeah… You never did actually win that multi player did you?
Jack Attridge
No…
Peter Molyneux
Hmmm…
Jack Attridge
Ranks matches as well.
Peter Molyneux
Well you’ve got to remember that still in Populous there’s a cheat. If I move the mouse to the top left hand side of the screen and press a certain key combination all my people would…
Jack Attridge
Do it again!
Peter Molyneux
I’m not going to show the world my cheat. It’s served me well over the years. Let’s look at Dungeon Keeper.
Jack Attridge
Okay. Cool.
Peter Molyneux
Right, here’s Dungeon Keeper. You know there is ehm… Not looking quite so dated this. I’m still really proud of Dungeon Keeper. I really love the feeling of a living world, again. You know, all these imps and creatures running around. But the one thing I want to take from Dungeon Keeper absolutely is the digging. I loved that digging. I loved the feeling of exploration and seeing those imps digging out. Even going into first person and digging for yourself. I really loved that and we’re going to steal that for Godus. So. If you remember we’re going to sculpt, push the land up, pull the land down, we’re going to clean up by tapping, but you’re also going to be digging into the landscape and revealing stuff. And the stuff I loved revealing in Dungeon Keeper were the resources, the gold and the gems. So that is one thing that we’re definitely going to take. There was this hand as well. I liked doing this. I liked slapping my imps. You can see that that was the inspiration for slapping your monkey in Black & White. So I really like this feeling of cruelty. Is that bad?
Jack Attridge
That’s in all of us I’m sure.
Peter Molyneux
Well yeah. And so, we’re going to have digging, we’re going to have sculpting but we’re also going to have a god power which is called The Finger of God. And what the finger of god will do is allow you to do little things in the world like tapping… like pushing people and tapping people and being cruel to people and picking people up. I love that feeling and sensation.
Jack Attridge
Well it’s still got to feel tactile.
Peter Molyneux
Yeah… Anything else from Dungeon Keeper? What are the bad bits?
Jack Attridge
The bad bits. Ehhhm…
Peter Molyneux
The interface is terrible again. Thousands of icons around there. The screen was still pretty small by today’s standards. So we want to have a kind of feeling of approaching an iconless game. As long as that doesn’t get in the way of the game play. Should we have a look at Black & White?
Jack Attridge
Let’s do it.
Peter Molyneux
Okay, here we are in Black & White. Now the first real thing is that we managed to get rid of a lot of that clutter in the interface so I’m definitely inspired by that. Also, it starts to look a little bit more like a real living world which is aspirational but I really want to take it that much further with Godus you know. We’re talking about a living world, the little people having an intelligence of themselves which they kind of had in Black & White. So let’s have a little look. Now the first thing is the interface of the hand moving around. It was good but it was very fiddly. Do you not think?
Jack Attridge
Yeah. Every now and then I grab onto something I don’t mean to grab onto.
Peter Molyneux
Yes. And we want to… being fiddly is something I hate. I love this ability of being able to pick things up. And you can tap on rocks and break them in half and use them as weapons, but it is incredibly fiddly. One of the beautiful things which we definitely want to try and keep is this feeling of tactile nature of the world. So have a look at how that grass moves as you move your hand around. Now that’s a little point but for me it makes the world more tangible and real. I also love the idea of being able to kind of interact with your people a little bit. What about you Jack? What are your favourite… what are the best bits and the worst bits?
Jack Attridge
For me it’s a sense of scale that I want to capture, you know. I mean Populous is very kind of locked off and I really want to be up in the clouds one moment and I really want to feel like I’m seeing the damage very kind of magnified the next.
Peter Molyneux
So, in summary, a very quick rush through all the games. We’re going to have the sculpting of the land from Black & White. We’re going to have the digging and the feeling of a little intelligence from the creatures in Dungeon Keeper. And we’re going to have the tactile nature of the world from Black & White along with the beauty and the feeling of being able to spread your godly influence around. That forms the basis of our mechanics in Black & White. And tomorrow we’re going to talk about single player and multi player and how we are going to use those mechanics and we’re also going to be starting to look at some of the very early prototypes that we’re doing. And! And this is the key thing about Kickstarter, we’re going to have to look at what people think of this video. If they don’t agree with things and it’s sensible, that should be incorporated in its design.
Jack Attridge
Absolutely. There’s no point doing a Kickstarter if we’re not listening.
Peter Molyneux
That is the whole point. It is the whole point. Great! Thank you very much.