Post by Lord Ba'al on May 13, 2014 19:13:53 GMT
Peter Molyneux
Hello, welcome to the sixth of the design updates. It’s the weekend now so we thought we’d have a bit of a fireside chat. We’ve got our fire, Apple-TV of course, or it could be Android and we’re just going to chat about stuff aren’t we?
Jack Attridge
Yeah.
Peter Molyneux
Yeah, I think we should. Well, one of the things that I saw was that some people were asking about the graphics. How good are the graphics going to be? Are they going to be like… I’ve got a hair in my mouth. God knows what that is. Are they going to be like From Dust or are they going to be like Populous? What’s your view on that Jack?
Jack Attridge
Well we have the unique art style of Paul McLaughlin, art director of every Bullfrog game, every Lionhead game. And in terms of how the land works I guess it’s got an organic feeling of like a free-form kind of world where you can literally move up bumps bump by bump and move it along …………… till they come to the point where they kind of form and make these lovely plateaus. And as you kind of raise them higher and higher and higher they kind of make these like mountains after these lovely, what would you say, they’re kind of like stairs almost. In the way they…
Peter Molyneux
Plateaus. Plateaus. I tell you what we should do. We should do a… show our concept images next week to everybody. Because there are places in the world, unbelievable though it is, that actually look like this, aren’t there? Paddy fields of Thailand and places like that. They really do look like this. So, it’s not that this is too abstract, although it’s pretty abstract, isn’t it?
Jack Attridge
Yeah.
Peter Molyneux
I’m still very keen, I still want to push the coding team… We’re going to meet with the coding team next week and we’re going to show… The way it works when you’re making a… Well, our approach to it is that you… Us designers have these dreams and then we have a meet… We get those dreams ready and we get a little presentation and we show the coding department what we want, you know. We want to have, for example, natural water, natural flowing water that you can direct around and that goes from a lake on a hill and that flows down, has a little game play meaning to it, we want that. Now those guys are going to turn around and say well, yeah, we can do that or we can’t do that. We’re very lucky that one of the lead programmers here is called Gary Leach and he worked on a game called Hydrophobia which had the best water dynamics ever I think in any game.
Jack Attridge
Yeah. Yeah, he couldn’t be more experienced.
Peter Molyneux
Yeah, so he’s got really good experience and we’re going to have that meeting tomorrow. And we might well video that meeting to see how it goes.
Jack Attridge
To catch the reactions.
Peter Molyneux
There is normally a look of slight, I was going to say hatred but maybe that’s too strong…
Jack Attridge
Panic?
Peter Molyneux
Panic! That’s the word. Panic from the coding department and the art department. But we definitely want… I love the uniqueness of Godus. I love the landscape… looks like no other landscape. And the original Populous looked like no other landscape before, so I love that. But I really want to get some natural effects in there.
Jack Attridge
Especially we’ve been developing this kind of digging and the chipping mechanics of it so, you know, you got the whole…
Peter Molyneux
Oh my god there’s a log going on the fire.
Jack Attridge
Ooo! That’s our butler. He’s in another dimension. He lives in the fire. So… But no, essentially you can chip away at the edges of the land and then you can start slowly digging little kind of trenches almost. These can be good for strategic reasons in the game.
Peter Molyneux
Then we could fill those trenches with water.
Jack Attridge
Yeah.
Peter Molyneux
Or lava.
Jack Attridge
Lava, yeah.
Peter Molyneux
You see there’s that look in your eye, you don’t believe. I really think that we should push the coding team hard for natural dynamic water. They’re going to turn around to us and probably say yes but, you know, that means the whole land could be water, but it needs to have some sorts of limitations on it, but I find that really exciting. Just imagine what people will be able to do with this sculpting tool and some of those natural effects will blow people away.
Jack Attridge
Speaking of the trenches kind of thing and lowering and like one of the things also in the original Populous that I’ve kind of been thinking about a bit, is the idea of exploring height, because that was an important thing in Populous. And how just being able to walk up a hill or walking up a steep slope takes a little bit longer. And the kind of strategy behind this is that it takes a little longer to build up higher but that’s also important because you’ve got these older more valuable buildings and if you’re doing these kind of multi player god versus god things it’s actually harder for an enemy to go up those hills. And then the same reason, because it’s harder to get up, these slopes you can then you know dip in these little trenches and these little pits and you can use them to………
Peter Molyneux
Sounds a little bit like castles and moats.
Jack Attridge
Yeah.
Peter Molyneux
Because if you look around England and Europe they always used to build castles on top of hills for that reason so that, you know, if I were a marauding Viking or something I could… you know, I’d have to run across the open plain and then I was… you know, by the time I got to the castle I was absolutely worn out and the I had to climb a big hill and that’s it. I’ve had it.
Jack Attridge
So we’ve almost created a moat simulator.
Peter Molyneux
Well, that’s interesting isn’t it how much we want to simulate of this. Of course there is a game that… and there are a few games that we are looking at at the moment which we’re taking some inspiration from and the Total War series was pretty cool wasn’t it?
Jack Attridge
Yeah. Except for me battles ehm… you know. A really important part of Populous because… In the original there wasn’t any graphical capability to really show them off and for me it’s… rather than having these little followers all walk off individually, have them to kind of act like a society, so when they will meet up they will decide to walk off together to find a place to build a house and they will help build it together if they do meet. In the same way, if they are going towards an enemy territory and the conflict to have that battle they are going to do that as a group. And so you will get those, like these big clusters of people going at it.
Peter Molyneux
Yeah. That sounds really good. I mean for me it is that feeling of power as you know these… and it’s amazing how just a few followers together starts feeling like an awful lot, you know. If I said there were a hundred followers, it doesn’t sound like an awful lot but there are not many games, although perhaps the Total War series, that feel like there are masses of troops. So inspired by that but also inspired by From Dust of course aren’t we?
Jack Attridge
Yeah.
Peter Molyneux
They did a really good job of doing that and graphically I love the feeling of fluidity from the land. Some of the things in it were very very very powerful, very early on, but I love that flow of lava and water. I wish that… Actually I was showing it to Paul McLaughlin here and you know talking about, you know, saying come on we can, you know, how would we graphically approach, you know, flowing and dynamic flowing with Godus and he was saying that he thought that the lava looked really flat.
Jack Attridge
Really?
Peter Molyneux
I didn’t think it looked flat. Well you know, here’s the inspiration. Should we just really briefly talk about one of the things we haven’t talked about at all at the moment and that is the totem?
Jack Attridge
Yeah. So ehm… We talked about it very briefly before, we didn’t go too deep into it. But essentially we said how you can’t really affect free will of your characters, of your following, and that’s the kind of beauty of it that you can only affect the world around them in order to kind of strategically affect decisions. But with the totem you can place this kind of worshippable monument anywhere in the world and then send your followers to go and follow it. And when they get there they’ll kind of pray around it. But it allows for… Oh the fire has stopped.
Peter Molyneux
I’m going to change our scene.
Jack Attridge
Okay. This is just so we don’t have to go outside because it’s really cold.
Peter Molyneux
No, absolutely.
Jack Attridge
I wanted to go outside.
Peter Molyneux
Jack wants to go outside. I said it was too bloody cold to go outside at all. It’s just freezing over here in England at the moment.
Jack Attridge
Yeah.
Peter Molyneux
I don’t like the cold.
Jack Attridge
When are we going to…
Peter Molyneux
Here we are. We’re in the forest. And in summer.
Jack Attridge
It’s not really moving. Although the ambiance…
Peter Molyneux
That’s what it would look like, look, it’s sort of… I wonder if someone went outside and ask you to plant a camera down for a couple of hours…
Jack Attridge
……….. to the pub.
Peter Molyneux
Forest nature sounds, ten hours long. I think Bigfoot’s going to come through the tree any minute.
Jack Attridge
We should have Bigfoot in the game.
Peter Molyneux
Yeah so the totem. The totem is the way of directing your people. All the people that are not in houses… If you place the totem down, they’ll suddenly look around and, you know, the word of god has come down, they’ll charge towards the totem. And they will battle anything on the way. So this is where it really turns a bit more of a strategy game. Placing your totem down on an enemy place, they’ll battle that enemy place. Placing the totem down in your example of a hill… Placing the totem down the top of the hill, they’ll all scurry up the top of the hill and stand around the totem, then if you allow them to settle they’ll settle across that hill. And that way… This is the one way that you can individually direct the groups of your people.
Jack Attridge
Exactly. So you can’t actually start a fight or tell them to fight but you can lead them into a fight.
Peter Molyneux
Exactly. It’s influence, it’s not control.
Jack Attridge
That’s right. I really love that. And there’s such a deep range of…
Peter Molyneux
What are we going to do tomorrow for our fireside chat? Have you got anything that you want to talk about? I was thinking about talking a bit more about digging and caving. A bit more about Dungeon Keeper.
Jack Attridge
Well that’s something that will kind of grow out of our prototype. Because, yesterday we kind of had our little first experiences with the prototype and crowds, did we?
Peter Molyneux
Yes, we did.
Jack Attridge
Well it’s not really through yet. But I mean that’s ……… been like a few days and a one man team and one artist.
Peter Molyneux
Yes. No that was great. Yeah that was a great moment to see… And this is what it’s like making a computer game, it’s that you get all very excited about the pictures in your head and… There’s a woodpecker about to fly out the screen… You’re very excited about what’s in your head and then, you know, one of the coders will do a prototype and in fact one of the coders did yesterday… did a prototype… the first time we saw followers really properly flowing across the landscape, really moving and it suddenly felt like a living world. How is our main prototype coder Fabs doing? Has he got the novu virus?
Jack Attridge
I don’t know. I haven’t heard from him.
Peter Molyneux
He’s novu fatal.
Jack Attridge
I don’t know.
Peter Molyneux
Do you know what the novu virus is?
Jack Attridge
No. It sounded really…
Peter Molyneux
It sounds like another one of those bird flu’s, in fact, you know, half the world’s population could be wiped out by the novu virus. I’m just making that up but it could be.
Jack Attridge
There we go. Ooh. So, you have, like plagues. In Godus.
Peter Molyneux
Well I think we’ve got to have plagues……….
Jack Attridge
So, you know, like just making one person sick. You have the power to make one person sick and you have to really think about where they are in the population because that person… If they’re out in the sticks it’s not really going to do anything but if he’s right in the heart of a society then that’s when you’re going to spread through.
Peter Molyneux
Oh. So I see, you’re going to have, you want a carrier.
Jack Attridge
A carrier of a plague.
Peter Molyneux
Of a plague. Well, okay, let’s ehm… that’s ehm… Atually that’s an interesting idea. You’d plague one of the… kind of got a funny thought there actually… ehm… you’d plague one of your opponent’s individuals and then try to get him back into the settlement. What if you plagued Immortal Imogen? That’d be brilliant. That would be the end of the civilization because she couldn’t be killed off. Yeah I think we should have plagues. You’ve got to be a little bit careful that… any of the god powers have got to be… unless they’re extremely powerful like the Armageddon, that they’re recoverable from and not frustrating. And although plagues sound great, plaguing someone, imagine if you were plagued and you’d have to kill off half your people.
Jack Attridge
Or you lead the one with the plague to their death.
Peter Molyneux
Yeah, if you can catch the plague early enough. Yeah, yeah. But I think you definitely would have plagues, yeah.
Jack Attridge
Yeah, it’s all a balance, but that’s what the alpha and beta is for.
Peter Molyneux
Yeah and what the alpha and beta is for is… we want more suggestions from people about these god powers. We’re definitely going to have swamp, we’re definitely going to have earthquake. We haven’t talked about how you cast those really and how you use the mouse and your finger to cast those. We’re definitely going to have volcano, definitely going to have tornado, definitely going to have tidal wave, in fact we’ve got a great tidal wave image coming out. It is amazing isn’t it? Wow! I think we’ve talked for quite some time now.
Jack Attridge
Yeah. We’ve had two backdrops. Tomorrow we’ll come to you from space.
Peter Molyneux
We’ll talk again tomorrow.
Hello, welcome to the sixth of the design updates. It’s the weekend now so we thought we’d have a bit of a fireside chat. We’ve got our fire, Apple-TV of course, or it could be Android and we’re just going to chat about stuff aren’t we?
Jack Attridge
Yeah.
Peter Molyneux
Yeah, I think we should. Well, one of the things that I saw was that some people were asking about the graphics. How good are the graphics going to be? Are they going to be like… I’ve got a hair in my mouth. God knows what that is. Are they going to be like From Dust or are they going to be like Populous? What’s your view on that Jack?
Jack Attridge
Well we have the unique art style of Paul McLaughlin, art director of every Bullfrog game, every Lionhead game. And in terms of how the land works I guess it’s got an organic feeling of like a free-form kind of world where you can literally move up bumps bump by bump and move it along …………… till they come to the point where they kind of form and make these lovely plateaus. And as you kind of raise them higher and higher and higher they kind of make these like mountains after these lovely, what would you say, they’re kind of like stairs almost. In the way they…
Peter Molyneux
Plateaus. Plateaus. I tell you what we should do. We should do a… show our concept images next week to everybody. Because there are places in the world, unbelievable though it is, that actually look like this, aren’t there? Paddy fields of Thailand and places like that. They really do look like this. So, it’s not that this is too abstract, although it’s pretty abstract, isn’t it?
Jack Attridge
Yeah.
Peter Molyneux
I’m still very keen, I still want to push the coding team… We’re going to meet with the coding team next week and we’re going to show… The way it works when you’re making a… Well, our approach to it is that you… Us designers have these dreams and then we have a meet… We get those dreams ready and we get a little presentation and we show the coding department what we want, you know. We want to have, for example, natural water, natural flowing water that you can direct around and that goes from a lake on a hill and that flows down, has a little game play meaning to it, we want that. Now those guys are going to turn around and say well, yeah, we can do that or we can’t do that. We’re very lucky that one of the lead programmers here is called Gary Leach and he worked on a game called Hydrophobia which had the best water dynamics ever I think in any game.
Jack Attridge
Yeah. Yeah, he couldn’t be more experienced.
Peter Molyneux
Yeah, so he’s got really good experience and we’re going to have that meeting tomorrow. And we might well video that meeting to see how it goes.
Jack Attridge
To catch the reactions.
Peter Molyneux
There is normally a look of slight, I was going to say hatred but maybe that’s too strong…
Jack Attridge
Panic?
Peter Molyneux
Panic! That’s the word. Panic from the coding department and the art department. But we definitely want… I love the uniqueness of Godus. I love the landscape… looks like no other landscape. And the original Populous looked like no other landscape before, so I love that. But I really want to get some natural effects in there.
Jack Attridge
Especially we’ve been developing this kind of digging and the chipping mechanics of it so, you know, you got the whole…
Peter Molyneux
Oh my god there’s a log going on the fire.
Jack Attridge
Ooo! That’s our butler. He’s in another dimension. He lives in the fire. So… But no, essentially you can chip away at the edges of the land and then you can start slowly digging little kind of trenches almost. These can be good for strategic reasons in the game.
Peter Molyneux
Then we could fill those trenches with water.
Jack Attridge
Yeah.
Peter Molyneux
Or lava.
Jack Attridge
Lava, yeah.
Peter Molyneux
You see there’s that look in your eye, you don’t believe. I really think that we should push the coding team hard for natural dynamic water. They’re going to turn around to us and probably say yes but, you know, that means the whole land could be water, but it needs to have some sorts of limitations on it, but I find that really exciting. Just imagine what people will be able to do with this sculpting tool and some of those natural effects will blow people away.
Jack Attridge
Speaking of the trenches kind of thing and lowering and like one of the things also in the original Populous that I’ve kind of been thinking about a bit, is the idea of exploring height, because that was an important thing in Populous. And how just being able to walk up a hill or walking up a steep slope takes a little bit longer. And the kind of strategy behind this is that it takes a little longer to build up higher but that’s also important because you’ve got these older more valuable buildings and if you’re doing these kind of multi player god versus god things it’s actually harder for an enemy to go up those hills. And then the same reason, because it’s harder to get up, these slopes you can then you know dip in these little trenches and these little pits and you can use them to………
Peter Molyneux
Sounds a little bit like castles and moats.
Jack Attridge
Yeah.
Peter Molyneux
Because if you look around England and Europe they always used to build castles on top of hills for that reason so that, you know, if I were a marauding Viking or something I could… you know, I’d have to run across the open plain and then I was… you know, by the time I got to the castle I was absolutely worn out and the I had to climb a big hill and that’s it. I’ve had it.
Jack Attridge
So we’ve almost created a moat simulator.
Peter Molyneux
Well, that’s interesting isn’t it how much we want to simulate of this. Of course there is a game that… and there are a few games that we are looking at at the moment which we’re taking some inspiration from and the Total War series was pretty cool wasn’t it?
Jack Attridge
Yeah. Except for me battles ehm… you know. A really important part of Populous because… In the original there wasn’t any graphical capability to really show them off and for me it’s… rather than having these little followers all walk off individually, have them to kind of act like a society, so when they will meet up they will decide to walk off together to find a place to build a house and they will help build it together if they do meet. In the same way, if they are going towards an enemy territory and the conflict to have that battle they are going to do that as a group. And so you will get those, like these big clusters of people going at it.
Peter Molyneux
Yeah. That sounds really good. I mean for me it is that feeling of power as you know these… and it’s amazing how just a few followers together starts feeling like an awful lot, you know. If I said there were a hundred followers, it doesn’t sound like an awful lot but there are not many games, although perhaps the Total War series, that feel like there are masses of troops. So inspired by that but also inspired by From Dust of course aren’t we?
Jack Attridge
Yeah.
Peter Molyneux
They did a really good job of doing that and graphically I love the feeling of fluidity from the land. Some of the things in it were very very very powerful, very early on, but I love that flow of lava and water. I wish that… Actually I was showing it to Paul McLaughlin here and you know talking about, you know, saying come on we can, you know, how would we graphically approach, you know, flowing and dynamic flowing with Godus and he was saying that he thought that the lava looked really flat.
Jack Attridge
Really?
Peter Molyneux
I didn’t think it looked flat. Well you know, here’s the inspiration. Should we just really briefly talk about one of the things we haven’t talked about at all at the moment and that is the totem?
Jack Attridge
Yeah. So ehm… We talked about it very briefly before, we didn’t go too deep into it. But essentially we said how you can’t really affect free will of your characters, of your following, and that’s the kind of beauty of it that you can only affect the world around them in order to kind of strategically affect decisions. But with the totem you can place this kind of worshippable monument anywhere in the world and then send your followers to go and follow it. And when they get there they’ll kind of pray around it. But it allows for… Oh the fire has stopped.
Peter Molyneux
I’m going to change our scene.
Jack Attridge
Okay. This is just so we don’t have to go outside because it’s really cold.
Peter Molyneux
No, absolutely.
Jack Attridge
I wanted to go outside.
Peter Molyneux
Jack wants to go outside. I said it was too bloody cold to go outside at all. It’s just freezing over here in England at the moment.
Jack Attridge
Yeah.
Peter Molyneux
I don’t like the cold.
Jack Attridge
When are we going to…
Peter Molyneux
Here we are. We’re in the forest. And in summer.
Jack Attridge
It’s not really moving. Although the ambiance…
Peter Molyneux
That’s what it would look like, look, it’s sort of… I wonder if someone went outside and ask you to plant a camera down for a couple of hours…
Jack Attridge
……….. to the pub.
Peter Molyneux
Forest nature sounds, ten hours long. I think Bigfoot’s going to come through the tree any minute.
Jack Attridge
We should have Bigfoot in the game.
Peter Molyneux
Yeah so the totem. The totem is the way of directing your people. All the people that are not in houses… If you place the totem down, they’ll suddenly look around and, you know, the word of god has come down, they’ll charge towards the totem. And they will battle anything on the way. So this is where it really turns a bit more of a strategy game. Placing your totem down on an enemy place, they’ll battle that enemy place. Placing the totem down in your example of a hill… Placing the totem down the top of the hill, they’ll all scurry up the top of the hill and stand around the totem, then if you allow them to settle they’ll settle across that hill. And that way… This is the one way that you can individually direct the groups of your people.
Jack Attridge
Exactly. So you can’t actually start a fight or tell them to fight but you can lead them into a fight.
Peter Molyneux
Exactly. It’s influence, it’s not control.
Jack Attridge
That’s right. I really love that. And there’s such a deep range of…
Peter Molyneux
What are we going to do tomorrow for our fireside chat? Have you got anything that you want to talk about? I was thinking about talking a bit more about digging and caving. A bit more about Dungeon Keeper.
Jack Attridge
Well that’s something that will kind of grow out of our prototype. Because, yesterday we kind of had our little first experiences with the prototype and crowds, did we?
Peter Molyneux
Yes, we did.
Jack Attridge
Well it’s not really through yet. But I mean that’s ……… been like a few days and a one man team and one artist.
Peter Molyneux
Yes. No that was great. Yeah that was a great moment to see… And this is what it’s like making a computer game, it’s that you get all very excited about the pictures in your head and… There’s a woodpecker about to fly out the screen… You’re very excited about what’s in your head and then, you know, one of the coders will do a prototype and in fact one of the coders did yesterday… did a prototype… the first time we saw followers really properly flowing across the landscape, really moving and it suddenly felt like a living world. How is our main prototype coder Fabs doing? Has he got the novu virus?
Jack Attridge
I don’t know. I haven’t heard from him.
Peter Molyneux
He’s novu fatal.
Jack Attridge
I don’t know.
Peter Molyneux
Do you know what the novu virus is?
Jack Attridge
No. It sounded really…
Peter Molyneux
It sounds like another one of those bird flu’s, in fact, you know, half the world’s population could be wiped out by the novu virus. I’m just making that up but it could be.
Jack Attridge
There we go. Ooh. So, you have, like plagues. In Godus.
Peter Molyneux
Well I think we’ve got to have plagues……….
Jack Attridge
So, you know, like just making one person sick. You have the power to make one person sick and you have to really think about where they are in the population because that person… If they’re out in the sticks it’s not really going to do anything but if he’s right in the heart of a society then that’s when you’re going to spread through.
Peter Molyneux
Oh. So I see, you’re going to have, you want a carrier.
Jack Attridge
A carrier of a plague.
Peter Molyneux
Of a plague. Well, okay, let’s ehm… that’s ehm… Atually that’s an interesting idea. You’d plague one of the… kind of got a funny thought there actually… ehm… you’d plague one of your opponent’s individuals and then try to get him back into the settlement. What if you plagued Immortal Imogen? That’d be brilliant. That would be the end of the civilization because she couldn’t be killed off. Yeah I think we should have plagues. You’ve got to be a little bit careful that… any of the god powers have got to be… unless they’re extremely powerful like the Armageddon, that they’re recoverable from and not frustrating. And although plagues sound great, plaguing someone, imagine if you were plagued and you’d have to kill off half your people.
Jack Attridge
Or you lead the one with the plague to their death.
Peter Molyneux
Yeah, if you can catch the plague early enough. Yeah, yeah. But I think you definitely would have plagues, yeah.
Jack Attridge
Yeah, it’s all a balance, but that’s what the alpha and beta is for.
Peter Molyneux
Yeah and what the alpha and beta is for is… we want more suggestions from people about these god powers. We’re definitely going to have swamp, we’re definitely going to have earthquake. We haven’t talked about how you cast those really and how you use the mouse and your finger to cast those. We’re definitely going to have volcano, definitely going to have tornado, definitely going to have tidal wave, in fact we’ve got a great tidal wave image coming out. It is amazing isn’t it? Wow! I think we’ve talked for quite some time now.
Jack Attridge
Yeah. We’ve had two backdrops. Tomorrow we’ll come to you from space.
Peter Molyneux
We’ll talk again tomorrow.