Post by Lord Ba'al on May 13, 2014 19:12:45 GMT
Peter Molyneux
Hello and welcome to the fifth of the design updates. Today we’re going to tell you a little bit about the pets or the… What do we call them?
Jack Attridge
Familiar.
Peter Molyneux
Familiars, thank you. And we’re also going to be doing a summary of where we currently stand with the design. Are you better now?
Jack Attridge
Much better. Yeah I got lots of lovely tweets from all the followers yesterday.
Peter Molyneux
Well we were worried about you. You blame it on a cup of tea.
Jack Attridge
Yeah something like that. Not Domino’s. Tea.
Peter Molyneux
Tea, right. Any brand of tea? Okay, so what are our questions?
Jack Attridge
Yesterday we were talking about the personalities of the little characters and things and that’s generally gotten a good response all ehm… Suicidal Sid and all that. There were a few people who weren’t too happy with Fragile Fiona…
Peter Molyneux
I know. I know, I didn’t think about that but I think that it’s going to be Fragile Fred.
Jack Attridge
Fragile Fred.
Peter Molyneux
And it’ll be Indestructible Imogen.
Jack Attridge
Bob. Bob! Imogen.
Peter Molyneux
Yeah, yeah. Exactly. You must be careful these days to be politically correct. Well that didn’t even enter into my mind.
Jack Attridge
So those characters they are quite humorous, quite stand out and people were worrying if all the characters are going to be like that or is that going to be a select few unique to the challenges in the game?
Peter Molyneux
Yeah I think these are going to be very very few, very sparingly and these are moments… When you go into a game that takes a long time you want to break it up a bit. The core thing that we’re keeping is that your followers have understandable behavior. They are going to spread out, they are going to settle. There is this thing called a totem which we are going to talk about next week where you can somewhat control them. That’s what most of your followers are like but there are a few of these personalities that sometimes come out. They’re like little bonuses that mix things up and they are humorous characters. They are game play things. They are going to give you bonuses if you keep Indestructible Imogen alive or…
Jack Attridge
You mean Suicidal Fred.
Peter Molyneux
Then… ehm… then… ehm…
Jack Attridge
Okay and we also talked about the good and evil theme yesterday and we might have been a little unclear because some people thought we were going back into the… like the very strong good and evil kind of twist and we just wanted to reinstate that it’s a bit more subtle than that.
Peter Molyneux
It’s a little bit more subtle. We’ve got to be careful here because if you do it wrong then what will end up happening is that people will feel compelled to be good or compelled to be evil. We don’t want that. We want people to just play the game how they play the game and give them tiny little benefits not big benefits. So if I were to set this as an example, purely as an example, is that if you were good to your people then the amount they breed, which is important because the more they breed the more followers you get the more belief you have, will go up by point one percent. And if you were evil then the amount of strength they have in a battle would go up by point one percent. So they’re tiny amounts but there is an esthetic difference to your people and there are also small game play differences. And this is where you’ve got to get it right. You can’t say that evil gods have people that are ten times more powerful, that would be completely wrong.
Jack Attridge
Yeah. Cool.
Peter Molyneux
This is the thing, Jack. This is the brilliant thing about why we’re doing Kickstarter. We’ll refine that we’ll balance that we’ll tweak that in our alpha and beta program. When we send those copies out to people, which will be early next year, we’ll be using something called analytics to analyze the way people play. Plus we’ll be getting feedback from people about what their impressions are. And this is how games like Minecraft were developed and that’s what we absolutely want to do.
Jack Attridge
Absolutely. So are we going to talk about one of our new tiers or one of our new aspects?
Peter Molyneux
Our new tier. Are we talking about tiers?
Jack Attridge
Are we going to talk about tiers? I thought we’d wait till next week.
Peter Molyneux
I think we’ll wait till next week.
Jack Attridge
So we’ll talk about familiars.
Peter Molyneux
Let’s talk about familiars. And then let’s do a summary.
Jack Attridge
Or…
Peter Molyneux
You thought of something.
Jack Attridge
Yeah. No. Ehm… It’s about powers actually because ehm… earlier in the week we did a thing about powers and people were kind of saying is this just destructive is this just going to be about using your powers to wreak havoc but we kind of omitted before the kind of creative side of powers, blossoming and affecting your world so…
Peter Molyneux
Yes. I mean powers… The way we balance powers is that… if I was a betting man, which I am, I would bet there would be as many constructive powers or nurturing powers as there are destructive powers. Now some of those nurturing powers are very easy to imagine. They are things like beautifying the land. Beautifying the land will make your people spread out quicker to the beautificational land. It’s about increasing the birthrate. It’s about getting people to breed and spread faster. It’s about healing. Those are the obvious ones but there are some interesting other ones that we may explore about the… I don’t want to give too many clues away, about the passion of your people. And those will be balancing the destructive powers. So it’s not all destructive powers, even though I am someone who likes to build things up and destroy them like with lego and stuff like that.
Jack Attridge
Absolutely. But in home world we want to give the ability to move your finger across barren land and have trees pop out.
Peter Molyneux
Lovely! Lovely. That would be lovely.
Jack Attridge
Yeah. And that’s an interesting…
Peter Molyneux
Acorns!
Jack Attridge
Acorns.
Peter Molyneux
Acorns and oak trees. There he goes again.
Jack Attridge
Might be a tier incentive maybe. But yeah, that’s the thing with battles you’re not just using powers to inflict damage on the enemy but you’re optimizing the land around your habitat. Because you know the more beautiful the land it will affect things like conception rates and stuff. And you have that power to decide if you want to give the gift of life to a family who want to have a kid or something which will then expand your population.
Peter Molyneux
Especially if that family is named after your facebook people so you are giving life to your very friends. Right. Let’s talk about familiars. Here’s the problem. It’s a design problem. The idea of a familiar or a pet sounds like it’s close to you, sounds like it’s something that’s with you. And of course, you are a god. What sort of pet or familiar does a god have? And that is where we go and do a bit of research and we’ve done this and we have found the pet or familiar and it’s a rather nice name called Huginn and Muninn. And this is… If you go to Wikipedia you can read all about Huginn and Muninn and it’s set in the Norse mythology. Odin, the allfather, he had these two ravens… and if you read this… they’ve got a lot of personality about them and they had some powers as ravens. And they brought him information and they gave him more power through that information. So that’s our inspiration for this. And that solves a couple of problems. Firstly these… And in Huginn and Muninn’s case they were ravens… Paul whom you can’t see because the camera is pointing the wrong way is currently thinking about how we’re going to visualize these ehm… Huginn and Muninn will be your familiars. They’ll be going out and assisting you in the game. Because they fly they can be with you, feel with you a lot of the time. So that’s our inspiration for this. We don’t want to imbalance the game by making them too powerful but we want them to be meaningful.
Jack Attridge
Absolutely.
Peter Molyneux
Let’s talk about the ehm… Let’s go down and use this bit of paper here and what I’m going to try and do on this piece of paper is just roar out everything that we’ve talked about this week in a very simple flow diagram. This is going to be using my horrible writing and spelling and I apologize in advance for that. So let’s just adjust the camera and then come down and look at this.
Jack Attridge
Right.
Peter Molyneux
Okay, here we go. So, what is Godus? Ehm… It is a reinvention of a god game. And Godus has got… There are three elements that I’m going to talk about. I’m going to talk about the structure, I’m going to talk about followers and I’m going to talk about mechanics. Okay let’s talk about mechanics first. So what you do with the mouse or your finger, mainly mouse… what you do is you sculpt. That’s the main thing that you do is sculpt. And there are several different ways of sculpting. You can sculpt by something called nudging. Think of nudging as being creating mountains ehm… as land… valleys… for your followers to settle on. You can also clear. You can clear and that is cleaning up. It’s clearing rubble for example. That’s with the click click click or the tap tap tap. Nudging is with the click and drag or the finger drag. Or you can dig. Think about digging as being mining. And I’m going to put caving down there, although that’s causing some problems at the moment. So that’s what you actually do. The followers will exploit what you do. They will settle on land that you’ve nudged and cleared, they will mine the resources that you have exposed and they’ll explore the caves that you’ve dug. Followers settle and they breed and they give you belief. And with that belief you can create miracles and you can create gifts. Gift of the gods. Think of miracles as being earthquake, volcano, tornado and on and on and on. Loads of ideas there. And think about when you cast those miracles it’s not just a click, it’s a click and a whirl and a push and a pull. I think of those as being very strategic. The gifts of the gods inspire your people. They civilize your people. And they affect the overall game. So these miracles, they’re what you use in multi player for sure, the gift of the gods is what you use in home world for sure. And then the structure is this simple. You take followers… you have home world which is this growing amazing place of all your people… think about going from a little tiny settlement to a huge metropolis over many many hours of play. You can take followers from your home world into multi player. Multi player is both cooperative and it’s competitive. It’s against your friends or it’s versus strangers. We haven’t talked about clans yet, that’s going to be a very important part. Or it’s single player. And think about that as working through stories/ a story and challenges. So that in a very quick summary is the game that we’re building here. The elements… So you modify the land to increase your followers and followers give you the powers to win the battles in multi player and single to make your home world bigger. That’s it. That’s what we’re creating. A lot of details yet to come. A lot of details on clans. We do want to call them cults but there is a bit of a negative connotation with cults. So we’ve got a lot of exciting stuff to say about that. And we’ve got enormous amounts of detail to go into here. We’re hoping that next week we’ll be able to start showing the prototype that we’re working on. To show the actual… some of the things on this chart. That’s our hope. The only problem is I’m sitting in Fabs’ chair. Fabs is someone who is working on that prototype. It’s the main program work here. And we think he’s got the noro virus. That worries me, a lot. If anyone knows any home cures for noro virus then please let us know. Ehm… Also worried about it spreading out. So thank you very very much for watching these videos. We love making them. We really want your feedback. We really want your ideas. We really want you to tell us what we’re doing wrong. What we’re not doing right. Next week we’ll continue doing this. We’re also going to be meeting a lot more of the team because you know… I’m just the big mouth idiot that talks a lot. If you want to meet some of the people that are actually going to fulfill some of the promises that we have been making. Thank you very much for watching.
Hello and welcome to the fifth of the design updates. Today we’re going to tell you a little bit about the pets or the… What do we call them?
Jack Attridge
Familiar.
Peter Molyneux
Familiars, thank you. And we’re also going to be doing a summary of where we currently stand with the design. Are you better now?
Jack Attridge
Much better. Yeah I got lots of lovely tweets from all the followers yesterday.
Peter Molyneux
Well we were worried about you. You blame it on a cup of tea.
Jack Attridge
Yeah something like that. Not Domino’s. Tea.
Peter Molyneux
Tea, right. Any brand of tea? Okay, so what are our questions?
Jack Attridge
Yesterday we were talking about the personalities of the little characters and things and that’s generally gotten a good response all ehm… Suicidal Sid and all that. There were a few people who weren’t too happy with Fragile Fiona…
Peter Molyneux
I know. I know, I didn’t think about that but I think that it’s going to be Fragile Fred.
Jack Attridge
Fragile Fred.
Peter Molyneux
And it’ll be Indestructible Imogen.
Jack Attridge
Bob. Bob! Imogen.
Peter Molyneux
Yeah, yeah. Exactly. You must be careful these days to be politically correct. Well that didn’t even enter into my mind.
Jack Attridge
So those characters they are quite humorous, quite stand out and people were worrying if all the characters are going to be like that or is that going to be a select few unique to the challenges in the game?
Peter Molyneux
Yeah I think these are going to be very very few, very sparingly and these are moments… When you go into a game that takes a long time you want to break it up a bit. The core thing that we’re keeping is that your followers have understandable behavior. They are going to spread out, they are going to settle. There is this thing called a totem which we are going to talk about next week where you can somewhat control them. That’s what most of your followers are like but there are a few of these personalities that sometimes come out. They’re like little bonuses that mix things up and they are humorous characters. They are game play things. They are going to give you bonuses if you keep Indestructible Imogen alive or…
Jack Attridge
You mean Suicidal Fred.
Peter Molyneux
Then… ehm… then… ehm…
Jack Attridge
Okay and we also talked about the good and evil theme yesterday and we might have been a little unclear because some people thought we were going back into the… like the very strong good and evil kind of twist and we just wanted to reinstate that it’s a bit more subtle than that.
Peter Molyneux
It’s a little bit more subtle. We’ve got to be careful here because if you do it wrong then what will end up happening is that people will feel compelled to be good or compelled to be evil. We don’t want that. We want people to just play the game how they play the game and give them tiny little benefits not big benefits. So if I were to set this as an example, purely as an example, is that if you were good to your people then the amount they breed, which is important because the more they breed the more followers you get the more belief you have, will go up by point one percent. And if you were evil then the amount of strength they have in a battle would go up by point one percent. So they’re tiny amounts but there is an esthetic difference to your people and there are also small game play differences. And this is where you’ve got to get it right. You can’t say that evil gods have people that are ten times more powerful, that would be completely wrong.
Jack Attridge
Yeah. Cool.
Peter Molyneux
This is the thing, Jack. This is the brilliant thing about why we’re doing Kickstarter. We’ll refine that we’ll balance that we’ll tweak that in our alpha and beta program. When we send those copies out to people, which will be early next year, we’ll be using something called analytics to analyze the way people play. Plus we’ll be getting feedback from people about what their impressions are. And this is how games like Minecraft were developed and that’s what we absolutely want to do.
Jack Attridge
Absolutely. So are we going to talk about one of our new tiers or one of our new aspects?
Peter Molyneux
Our new tier. Are we talking about tiers?
Jack Attridge
Are we going to talk about tiers? I thought we’d wait till next week.
Peter Molyneux
I think we’ll wait till next week.
Jack Attridge
So we’ll talk about familiars.
Peter Molyneux
Let’s talk about familiars. And then let’s do a summary.
Jack Attridge
Or…
Peter Molyneux
You thought of something.
Jack Attridge
Yeah. No. Ehm… It’s about powers actually because ehm… earlier in the week we did a thing about powers and people were kind of saying is this just destructive is this just going to be about using your powers to wreak havoc but we kind of omitted before the kind of creative side of powers, blossoming and affecting your world so…
Peter Molyneux
Yes. I mean powers… The way we balance powers is that… if I was a betting man, which I am, I would bet there would be as many constructive powers or nurturing powers as there are destructive powers. Now some of those nurturing powers are very easy to imagine. They are things like beautifying the land. Beautifying the land will make your people spread out quicker to the beautificational land. It’s about increasing the birthrate. It’s about getting people to breed and spread faster. It’s about healing. Those are the obvious ones but there are some interesting other ones that we may explore about the… I don’t want to give too many clues away, about the passion of your people. And those will be balancing the destructive powers. So it’s not all destructive powers, even though I am someone who likes to build things up and destroy them like with lego and stuff like that.
Jack Attridge
Absolutely. But in home world we want to give the ability to move your finger across barren land and have trees pop out.
Peter Molyneux
Lovely! Lovely. That would be lovely.
Jack Attridge
Yeah. And that’s an interesting…
Peter Molyneux
Acorns!
Jack Attridge
Acorns.
Peter Molyneux
Acorns and oak trees. There he goes again.
Jack Attridge
Might be a tier incentive maybe. But yeah, that’s the thing with battles you’re not just using powers to inflict damage on the enemy but you’re optimizing the land around your habitat. Because you know the more beautiful the land it will affect things like conception rates and stuff. And you have that power to decide if you want to give the gift of life to a family who want to have a kid or something which will then expand your population.
Peter Molyneux
Especially if that family is named after your facebook people so you are giving life to your very friends. Right. Let’s talk about familiars. Here’s the problem. It’s a design problem. The idea of a familiar or a pet sounds like it’s close to you, sounds like it’s something that’s with you. And of course, you are a god. What sort of pet or familiar does a god have? And that is where we go and do a bit of research and we’ve done this and we have found the pet or familiar and it’s a rather nice name called Huginn and Muninn. And this is… If you go to Wikipedia you can read all about Huginn and Muninn and it’s set in the Norse mythology. Odin, the allfather, he had these two ravens… and if you read this… they’ve got a lot of personality about them and they had some powers as ravens. And they brought him information and they gave him more power through that information. So that’s our inspiration for this. And that solves a couple of problems. Firstly these… And in Huginn and Muninn’s case they were ravens… Paul whom you can’t see because the camera is pointing the wrong way is currently thinking about how we’re going to visualize these ehm… Huginn and Muninn will be your familiars. They’ll be going out and assisting you in the game. Because they fly they can be with you, feel with you a lot of the time. So that’s our inspiration for this. We don’t want to imbalance the game by making them too powerful but we want them to be meaningful.
Jack Attridge
Absolutely.
Peter Molyneux
Let’s talk about the ehm… Let’s go down and use this bit of paper here and what I’m going to try and do on this piece of paper is just roar out everything that we’ve talked about this week in a very simple flow diagram. This is going to be using my horrible writing and spelling and I apologize in advance for that. So let’s just adjust the camera and then come down and look at this.
Jack Attridge
Right.
Peter Molyneux
Okay, here we go. So, what is Godus? Ehm… It is a reinvention of a god game. And Godus has got… There are three elements that I’m going to talk about. I’m going to talk about the structure, I’m going to talk about followers and I’m going to talk about mechanics. Okay let’s talk about mechanics first. So what you do with the mouse or your finger, mainly mouse… what you do is you sculpt. That’s the main thing that you do is sculpt. And there are several different ways of sculpting. You can sculpt by something called nudging. Think of nudging as being creating mountains ehm… as land… valleys… for your followers to settle on. You can also clear. You can clear and that is cleaning up. It’s clearing rubble for example. That’s with the click click click or the tap tap tap. Nudging is with the click and drag or the finger drag. Or you can dig. Think about digging as being mining. And I’m going to put caving down there, although that’s causing some problems at the moment. So that’s what you actually do. The followers will exploit what you do. They will settle on land that you’ve nudged and cleared, they will mine the resources that you have exposed and they’ll explore the caves that you’ve dug. Followers settle and they breed and they give you belief. And with that belief you can create miracles and you can create gifts. Gift of the gods. Think of miracles as being earthquake, volcano, tornado and on and on and on. Loads of ideas there. And think about when you cast those miracles it’s not just a click, it’s a click and a whirl and a push and a pull. I think of those as being very strategic. The gifts of the gods inspire your people. They civilize your people. And they affect the overall game. So these miracles, they’re what you use in multi player for sure, the gift of the gods is what you use in home world for sure. And then the structure is this simple. You take followers… you have home world which is this growing amazing place of all your people… think about going from a little tiny settlement to a huge metropolis over many many hours of play. You can take followers from your home world into multi player. Multi player is both cooperative and it’s competitive. It’s against your friends or it’s versus strangers. We haven’t talked about clans yet, that’s going to be a very important part. Or it’s single player. And think about that as working through stories/ a story and challenges. So that in a very quick summary is the game that we’re building here. The elements… So you modify the land to increase your followers and followers give you the powers to win the battles in multi player and single to make your home world bigger. That’s it. That’s what we’re creating. A lot of details yet to come. A lot of details on clans. We do want to call them cults but there is a bit of a negative connotation with cults. So we’ve got a lot of exciting stuff to say about that. And we’ve got enormous amounts of detail to go into here. We’re hoping that next week we’ll be able to start showing the prototype that we’re working on. To show the actual… some of the things on this chart. That’s our hope. The only problem is I’m sitting in Fabs’ chair. Fabs is someone who is working on that prototype. It’s the main program work here. And we think he’s got the noro virus. That worries me, a lot. If anyone knows any home cures for noro virus then please let us know. Ehm… Also worried about it spreading out. So thank you very very much for watching these videos. We love making them. We really want your feedback. We really want your ideas. We really want you to tell us what we’re doing wrong. What we’re not doing right. Next week we’ll continue doing this. We’re also going to be meeting a lot more of the team because you know… I’m just the big mouth idiot that talks a lot. If you want to meet some of the people that are actually going to fulfill some of the promises that we have been making. Thank you very much for watching.