Post by Lord Ba'al on May 13, 2014 19:07:08 GMT
Peter Molyneux
Well here we are on the third of the design updates and we’re going to be talking about god powers and we’re going to be talking about gift of the gods. But first as everyday we’re going to do this, we’re going to take some of your questions and some of the feedback that we’ve had from yesterday’s presentation. So what have we got there?
Jack Attridge
So we were talking about home world and multi player yesterday, the kind of foundations and structures of those things, there’s a few elements people were worried might not be in there and we want to confirm that, good news, they are. And one of those things is AI battles, fighting against a deity. So you don’t need to have these kind of Populous-esque battles just with other people. There is going to be that single player ability.
Peter Molyneux
Yeah. In the ehm… remember the ehm… in ehm… when you take your followers from home world you can take them into one of three modes, multi player with friends, multi player against strangers and these challenges. We’ve decided not to call them crusades haven’t we? We’re worried that we’re going to have a…
Jack Attridge
No we want to be politically correct and respectful. They’re placeholder titles.
Peter Molyneux
Placeholder titles so the ehm… challenge mode, or something. Now this is going to be… we’re going to script it, it’s going to have AI in it, there are going to be AI driven gods, some of those gods are going to challenge you. Remember in Godus you can be the god you want to be not the god we want you to be so you can be cruel or kind and we’re going to sculpt the challenges around that. We did that a lot in games like Black & White and indeed in the Fable series and we’re going to do that again.
Jack Attridge
Brilliant! And ehm… the other one, which was about people worrying… In your home land, in your home world, can you bring in your friends to help you sculpt that world to help you look after your followers. And again, that’s a yes.
Peter Molyneux
Hmmm… Hmmm… Hmmm…
Jack Attridge
Well we said we would.
Peter Molyneux
Well I know, I know, I know we said we would, but here’s my worry. What we’re really talking about here, my dream, the thing that I would love and that thing that was in my mind that I think we’ve discussed is that all home worlds are connected throughout the world. But that is… we’ve tried this tech… we’ve got this tech, the one we’ve tried with Curiosity of connecting thousands and thousands of people together in a simultaneous experience and it is big tech. And I’m wondering, if we want to do this it’s going to have to be I’m afraid via a stretch goal.
Jack Attridge
Oh that’s true yeah.
Peter Molyneux
I love the cooperation side, I love being able to show off my home world, I have no doubt that you’ll be able to visit my home world and may be able to do some slight things in there, but actually having all these worlds connected is a huge thing and it’s going to require lots of servers so big stretch goal I’m afraid but we have to be realistic. Not that I’m known for that, but there you go.
Jack Attridge
Fair enough.
Peter Molyneux
What’s the next thing they’ve got.
Jack Attridge
Well… Speaking of stretch goals, speaking of features we’d love to have, one of the things that have been coming up a little bit is if you’ve ever played Dungeon Keeper and you remember being able to possess one of your little creatures and see in first person, that would be beautiful. I’d love to jump into the scale of being a little person staring and enemy in the face as he’s running towards me and seeing a massive meteor scream over the top of me before it smashes up the ground under me.
Peter Molyneux
Yes. Yeeees. It would. Yeeees. Yes. Of course, remembering back to that time, the first person mode to be honest with you was a bit of a gimmick. Other than the imps. With the imps and the digging there was a reason to do that. But the reason why it wasn’t as good as it should’ve been was that we spent a lot more time on the controls because the controls were rubbish. I’d love to do first person, I’d love to go around the world as a follower, I would love to go around the world as a pet or familiar, that would be awesome. It’s down to these guys over here and ehm… essentially what it means is you’re balancing two whole ways of playing the game and that’s a lot of work.
Jack Attridge
Exactly.
Peter Molyneux
I’m really a “no” man today and not a “yes” man. What’s happened to me?
Jack Attridge
What’s going on?
Peter Molyneux
Not sure.
Jack Attridge
I’m the “yes” man now. Okay. I mean something like that. We’ve planned for a seven to nine month development schedule for kind of the core features and something like that would be amazing and we could implement it in a really powerful and resonant way, but it does require those extra stretch goals. If we can hit our target, we’re still a little while away from it, but once we get closer to that finishing line we can start saying okay for a little bit more we can really expand our horizons of what we can really achieve with such features.
Peter Molyneux
Yes. Yes.
Jack Attridge
So the third one, and this is the big one so we’re glad we can finally talk about it, everyone in the PC community and on Neogaf as well a lot of people are worried about this… is the idea that this was about PC and about mobile. We complete appreciate that worry. PC is a really hardcore gamer market and the kind of touch screens and mobiles they are very usually in a casual space. And we want to confirm that this isn’t a casual game.
Peter Molyneux
I think we’ve solved this problem. And ehm… Yes your finger is similar to a mouse but it is not the same. So what we’re going to do is this. When you play the ipad or iphone version you have to pick up your mouse and roll it on the screen, that’s how you control it. That would solve… I think that would make PC people happy.
Jack Attridge
Yeah. Thinking outside the box.
Peter Molyneux
Seriously, here’s the thing. The original Populous, the original Dungeon Keeper, the original Black & White were actually converted onto a lot of different formats. Populous was converted for mouse, it was converted for controller it was converted to all sorts of different input devices, so we’re quite experienced with doing this. But the main focus at the moment is to get the mouse right. That is our main focus, it’s our obsession. When we’re thinking about, what I’ve talked about, nudging the land we’re thinking about how it feels on the mouse. We kind of… yeah we’re also secondary thinking about how it feels with your finger, but I think if we just said “oh the mouse is the same as your finger” we’d be idiots. So we’re really focusing on that mouse making sure that the mouse feels tactile. I love that mouse input device. I still think that balancing and refining it in the right way is just going to give us a wonderful wonderful game. So PC players, don’t worry about it. Mobile and tablet players, you know, absolutely it’s going to be a delightful interface, but definitely the PC too.
Jack Attridge
So we’re not thinking of it as a way of dumbing down for casual market, we’re thinking about basically an alternate input device. We want to be able to raise mountains with our fingers and we also want to be able to do it with the mouse.
Peter Molyneux
Of course… There is one thing to talk about isn’t there. That is about why Godus is such a wonderful experience on both PC and mobile. You get quite excited about this don’t you?
Jack Attridge
Yes. So, you know, I’m in the middle of a game of Godus. I’m battling Peter PC to PC and then “crikey!” I need to go to work, or school, or the pub or to salsa class or something like that. And then I say okay, well, just pause, give me a minute to fire up my ipad. And then continue playing that god versus god match on the bus. Cross platform multi player I think is brilliant. And although you are getting a graphical loss on the lower end touch platform you are getting entirely intact beautiful PC gaming and you seamlessly battle. And I think that’s brilliant. So this isn’t us doing a dumbed down game for mobile but we’re using mobile and touch as an extension of that experience and I think that’s incredible.
Peter Molyneux
Yeah. And I think that these things nowadays like tablets and PC’s and gosh knows what else, I think that these are just windows into an experience. And I think it should be… if you know how to play the game with a mouse you should know how to play it with your finger on a tablet and then you’re free to play wherever you want.
Jack Attridge
Absolutely.
Peter Molyneux
We should talk about god powers now. Oh unless there were any more questions.
Jack Attridge
No those were the main few. And we’ll carry on going on through…
Peter Molyneux
Let’s go walkabout. Yeah… now… so what we’re going to do is we’re just going to walk over to the art department where they’re concepting some of the god powers. This is our concept wall here, you can see some nice concepts there. We’re going to be revealing some more of those next week. This is our prototype team here. They’re all working really hard on the prototype. How’s it going Fabs?
Fabs
Pretty well actually.
Peter Molyneux
Pretty well! There’s the quote. Will we be able to play it before the end of our Kickstarter?
Fabs
Maybe.
Peter Molyneux
Maybe! I’ll take that as a yes because I’m a positive person. Right here we have the artists ehm… So we’ve been thinking a lot about god powers. Now it’s all about that incredible feeling of being a god. When you click that mouse and fire off that volcano when you swipe the mouse or your finger and throw tornadoes that’s going to feel fantastic. And you can just see some of the concept shots come through. We really love that feeling of fire. Fire is a brilliant thing. There’s a little tiny feature in Black & White that excited me hugely and that is that fire is thermodynamic. It gives off heat. And that means if it burns a tree then another tree will burn. Anyway, we’ll go into that when we go into more details next week. That’s a meteor strike. Here we’ve got a volcano and you can see the excitement there. We’re hoping for some fluid dynamics to get the fluid flowing down the side of the hill. And then just over here we’ve got a little sneak peek at what some of the battles are going to feel like. Look at that, it’s amazing! It’s not only the god powers that you... it’s how your people react, how your followers react to those emergencies and disasters. So we’ve got some fantastic destructive powers. Let’s go and talk a little bit about gift of the gods. So you can use your destructive powers if you’ve gotten enough belief from your people anytime you like but gift of the gods is that you use your belief to create these gifts to give to people. And those gifts of the gods are things like weapons. It’s giving you people the knowledge of weapons. You know, the sword of Artemis, that’s what we’re inspired by. Some of the old Greek gods or Norse gods were constantly coming down and giving gifts to all sorts of mortals and that’s exactly what we’re going to do here. So the gift of the gods is a more of a placid side of god powers whereas the destructive volcanic sort of multi player ehm… huge effects are more on the destructive side. Any thoughts on god powers what do you think then Jack?
Jack Attridge
Well I think it’s fascinating that you’re basically using your powers as a key strategic aspect in multi player. So it’s all about ……. that destruction saving up. You could use a little power early on or you can hold off and build up your power a bit more and you know really bring down the pain on your enemy.
Peter Molyneux
Ehm… yes. Well let’s talk about that. Because each one of these powers as we slightly touched on in Populous 2 and touched a little bit more in Black & White have more than just a visual effect. They are ehm… we’ve got here a little model of a landscape. We built it out of lego. So I’m going to try and demonstrate this, with this, the column of power. We can call this a tornado. So if you cast the column of power, if you push your mouse in a certain way it will move the column of power along and that will start biting into the landscape. Now what I mean by… I know what’s going to happen… what I mean by that is that, as you can see from that picture, it will start cutting away into the landscape. If you whisk the whirlwind around, it’ll really start sort of… You can see that sort of thing is going to happen. Perhaps not so spectacularly, but there is a depth to these god powers. They destroy the landscape, they modify the landscape, they are controllable. There are rules, strong rules in there which gives it a strategic depth that is going to be so fascinating in multi player. Sorry Glenn, the guy over there Glenn, we’re going to talk to him on Friday took about an hour to build this model and I just smashed it to bits. Anyway, that is the end of our video update for today. As I’ve said all of this, all of this data is going to be summarized in a lovely clear document by Jack, who hates doing documents. Not as much as I hate to do them. And ehm… that’s going to be fascinating. Tomorrow we’re going to focus on followers, their behavior, who they are, what they are and we’re going to talk a little bit about this thing called a pet or familiar. Not as spectacular as the god powers but it’s going to be a fascinating insight into the depth of the game. Thank you very much for watching.
Jack Attridge
Oh and keep letting us know what you think about these videos everyday.
Peter Molyneux
Exactly! Exactly, we’re going to spend tonight looking at Neogaf by the way and seeing what things they say on there so we might actually have some responses from that. Thanks very much everyone.
Jack Attridge
Rock and roll.
Well here we are on the third of the design updates and we’re going to be talking about god powers and we’re going to be talking about gift of the gods. But first as everyday we’re going to do this, we’re going to take some of your questions and some of the feedback that we’ve had from yesterday’s presentation. So what have we got there?
Jack Attridge
So we were talking about home world and multi player yesterday, the kind of foundations and structures of those things, there’s a few elements people were worried might not be in there and we want to confirm that, good news, they are. And one of those things is AI battles, fighting against a deity. So you don’t need to have these kind of Populous-esque battles just with other people. There is going to be that single player ability.
Peter Molyneux
Yeah. In the ehm… remember the ehm… in ehm… when you take your followers from home world you can take them into one of three modes, multi player with friends, multi player against strangers and these challenges. We’ve decided not to call them crusades haven’t we? We’re worried that we’re going to have a…
Jack Attridge
No we want to be politically correct and respectful. They’re placeholder titles.
Peter Molyneux
Placeholder titles so the ehm… challenge mode, or something. Now this is going to be… we’re going to script it, it’s going to have AI in it, there are going to be AI driven gods, some of those gods are going to challenge you. Remember in Godus you can be the god you want to be not the god we want you to be so you can be cruel or kind and we’re going to sculpt the challenges around that. We did that a lot in games like Black & White and indeed in the Fable series and we’re going to do that again.
Jack Attridge
Brilliant! And ehm… the other one, which was about people worrying… In your home land, in your home world, can you bring in your friends to help you sculpt that world to help you look after your followers. And again, that’s a yes.
Peter Molyneux
Hmmm… Hmmm… Hmmm…
Jack Attridge
Well we said we would.
Peter Molyneux
Well I know, I know, I know we said we would, but here’s my worry. What we’re really talking about here, my dream, the thing that I would love and that thing that was in my mind that I think we’ve discussed is that all home worlds are connected throughout the world. But that is… we’ve tried this tech… we’ve got this tech, the one we’ve tried with Curiosity of connecting thousands and thousands of people together in a simultaneous experience and it is big tech. And I’m wondering, if we want to do this it’s going to have to be I’m afraid via a stretch goal.
Jack Attridge
Oh that’s true yeah.
Peter Molyneux
I love the cooperation side, I love being able to show off my home world, I have no doubt that you’ll be able to visit my home world and may be able to do some slight things in there, but actually having all these worlds connected is a huge thing and it’s going to require lots of servers so big stretch goal I’m afraid but we have to be realistic. Not that I’m known for that, but there you go.
Jack Attridge
Fair enough.
Peter Molyneux
What’s the next thing they’ve got.
Jack Attridge
Well… Speaking of stretch goals, speaking of features we’d love to have, one of the things that have been coming up a little bit is if you’ve ever played Dungeon Keeper and you remember being able to possess one of your little creatures and see in first person, that would be beautiful. I’d love to jump into the scale of being a little person staring and enemy in the face as he’s running towards me and seeing a massive meteor scream over the top of me before it smashes up the ground under me.
Peter Molyneux
Yes. Yeeees. It would. Yeeees. Yes. Of course, remembering back to that time, the first person mode to be honest with you was a bit of a gimmick. Other than the imps. With the imps and the digging there was a reason to do that. But the reason why it wasn’t as good as it should’ve been was that we spent a lot more time on the controls because the controls were rubbish. I’d love to do first person, I’d love to go around the world as a follower, I would love to go around the world as a pet or familiar, that would be awesome. It’s down to these guys over here and ehm… essentially what it means is you’re balancing two whole ways of playing the game and that’s a lot of work.
Jack Attridge
Exactly.
Peter Molyneux
I’m really a “no” man today and not a “yes” man. What’s happened to me?
Jack Attridge
What’s going on?
Peter Molyneux
Not sure.
Jack Attridge
I’m the “yes” man now. Okay. I mean something like that. We’ve planned for a seven to nine month development schedule for kind of the core features and something like that would be amazing and we could implement it in a really powerful and resonant way, but it does require those extra stretch goals. If we can hit our target, we’re still a little while away from it, but once we get closer to that finishing line we can start saying okay for a little bit more we can really expand our horizons of what we can really achieve with such features.
Peter Molyneux
Yes. Yes.
Jack Attridge
So the third one, and this is the big one so we’re glad we can finally talk about it, everyone in the PC community and on Neogaf as well a lot of people are worried about this… is the idea that this was about PC and about mobile. We complete appreciate that worry. PC is a really hardcore gamer market and the kind of touch screens and mobiles they are very usually in a casual space. And we want to confirm that this isn’t a casual game.
Peter Molyneux
I think we’ve solved this problem. And ehm… Yes your finger is similar to a mouse but it is not the same. So what we’re going to do is this. When you play the ipad or iphone version you have to pick up your mouse and roll it on the screen, that’s how you control it. That would solve… I think that would make PC people happy.
Jack Attridge
Yeah. Thinking outside the box.
Peter Molyneux
Seriously, here’s the thing. The original Populous, the original Dungeon Keeper, the original Black & White were actually converted onto a lot of different formats. Populous was converted for mouse, it was converted for controller it was converted to all sorts of different input devices, so we’re quite experienced with doing this. But the main focus at the moment is to get the mouse right. That is our main focus, it’s our obsession. When we’re thinking about, what I’ve talked about, nudging the land we’re thinking about how it feels on the mouse. We kind of… yeah we’re also secondary thinking about how it feels with your finger, but I think if we just said “oh the mouse is the same as your finger” we’d be idiots. So we’re really focusing on that mouse making sure that the mouse feels tactile. I love that mouse input device. I still think that balancing and refining it in the right way is just going to give us a wonderful wonderful game. So PC players, don’t worry about it. Mobile and tablet players, you know, absolutely it’s going to be a delightful interface, but definitely the PC too.
Jack Attridge
So we’re not thinking of it as a way of dumbing down for casual market, we’re thinking about basically an alternate input device. We want to be able to raise mountains with our fingers and we also want to be able to do it with the mouse.
Peter Molyneux
Of course… There is one thing to talk about isn’t there. That is about why Godus is such a wonderful experience on both PC and mobile. You get quite excited about this don’t you?
Jack Attridge
Yes. So, you know, I’m in the middle of a game of Godus. I’m battling Peter PC to PC and then “crikey!” I need to go to work, or school, or the pub or to salsa class or something like that. And then I say okay, well, just pause, give me a minute to fire up my ipad. And then continue playing that god versus god match on the bus. Cross platform multi player I think is brilliant. And although you are getting a graphical loss on the lower end touch platform you are getting entirely intact beautiful PC gaming and you seamlessly battle. And I think that’s brilliant. So this isn’t us doing a dumbed down game for mobile but we’re using mobile and touch as an extension of that experience and I think that’s incredible.
Peter Molyneux
Yeah. And I think that these things nowadays like tablets and PC’s and gosh knows what else, I think that these are just windows into an experience. And I think it should be… if you know how to play the game with a mouse you should know how to play it with your finger on a tablet and then you’re free to play wherever you want.
Jack Attridge
Absolutely.
Peter Molyneux
We should talk about god powers now. Oh unless there were any more questions.
Jack Attridge
No those were the main few. And we’ll carry on going on through…
Peter Molyneux
Let’s go walkabout. Yeah… now… so what we’re going to do is we’re just going to walk over to the art department where they’re concepting some of the god powers. This is our concept wall here, you can see some nice concepts there. We’re going to be revealing some more of those next week. This is our prototype team here. They’re all working really hard on the prototype. How’s it going Fabs?
Fabs
Pretty well actually.
Peter Molyneux
Pretty well! There’s the quote. Will we be able to play it before the end of our Kickstarter?
Fabs
Maybe.
Peter Molyneux
Maybe! I’ll take that as a yes because I’m a positive person. Right here we have the artists ehm… So we’ve been thinking a lot about god powers. Now it’s all about that incredible feeling of being a god. When you click that mouse and fire off that volcano when you swipe the mouse or your finger and throw tornadoes that’s going to feel fantastic. And you can just see some of the concept shots come through. We really love that feeling of fire. Fire is a brilliant thing. There’s a little tiny feature in Black & White that excited me hugely and that is that fire is thermodynamic. It gives off heat. And that means if it burns a tree then another tree will burn. Anyway, we’ll go into that when we go into more details next week. That’s a meteor strike. Here we’ve got a volcano and you can see the excitement there. We’re hoping for some fluid dynamics to get the fluid flowing down the side of the hill. And then just over here we’ve got a little sneak peek at what some of the battles are going to feel like. Look at that, it’s amazing! It’s not only the god powers that you... it’s how your people react, how your followers react to those emergencies and disasters. So we’ve got some fantastic destructive powers. Let’s go and talk a little bit about gift of the gods. So you can use your destructive powers if you’ve gotten enough belief from your people anytime you like but gift of the gods is that you use your belief to create these gifts to give to people. And those gifts of the gods are things like weapons. It’s giving you people the knowledge of weapons. You know, the sword of Artemis, that’s what we’re inspired by. Some of the old Greek gods or Norse gods were constantly coming down and giving gifts to all sorts of mortals and that’s exactly what we’re going to do here. So the gift of the gods is a more of a placid side of god powers whereas the destructive volcanic sort of multi player ehm… huge effects are more on the destructive side. Any thoughts on god powers what do you think then Jack?
Jack Attridge
Well I think it’s fascinating that you’re basically using your powers as a key strategic aspect in multi player. So it’s all about ……. that destruction saving up. You could use a little power early on or you can hold off and build up your power a bit more and you know really bring down the pain on your enemy.
Peter Molyneux
Ehm… yes. Well let’s talk about that. Because each one of these powers as we slightly touched on in Populous 2 and touched a little bit more in Black & White have more than just a visual effect. They are ehm… we’ve got here a little model of a landscape. We built it out of lego. So I’m going to try and demonstrate this, with this, the column of power. We can call this a tornado. So if you cast the column of power, if you push your mouse in a certain way it will move the column of power along and that will start biting into the landscape. Now what I mean by… I know what’s going to happen… what I mean by that is that, as you can see from that picture, it will start cutting away into the landscape. If you whisk the whirlwind around, it’ll really start sort of… You can see that sort of thing is going to happen. Perhaps not so spectacularly, but there is a depth to these god powers. They destroy the landscape, they modify the landscape, they are controllable. There are rules, strong rules in there which gives it a strategic depth that is going to be so fascinating in multi player. Sorry Glenn, the guy over there Glenn, we’re going to talk to him on Friday took about an hour to build this model and I just smashed it to bits. Anyway, that is the end of our video update for today. As I’ve said all of this, all of this data is going to be summarized in a lovely clear document by Jack, who hates doing documents. Not as much as I hate to do them. And ehm… that’s going to be fascinating. Tomorrow we’re going to focus on followers, their behavior, who they are, what they are and we’re going to talk a little bit about this thing called a pet or familiar. Not as spectacular as the god powers but it’s going to be a fascinating insight into the depth of the game. Thank you very much for watching.
Jack Attridge
Oh and keep letting us know what you think about these videos everyday.
Peter Molyneux
Exactly! Exactly, we’re going to spend tonight looking at Neogaf by the way and seeing what things they say on there so we might actually have some responses from that. Thanks very much everyone.
Jack Attridge
Rock and roll.