Post by Lord Ba'al on May 13, 2014 19:16:23 GMT
Peter Molyneux
Right, here we are on the next, I’m not going to say Design Update, I’m going to say Prototype Update, because we’re so focused on this prototype that is going to make something playable and we’re even considering releasing it aren’t we Jack?
Jack Attridge
If we get it done in time.
Peter Molyneux
Well, that’s making me very nervous. I’m not going to promise that.
Jack Attridge
Well the Kickstarter backers will get it after the end of the Kickstarter.
Peter Molyneux
Yes! Yes. Or maybe before the end of the Kickstarter.
Jack Attridge
Intriguing.
Peter Molyneux
Yeah. What do you think of our tree? It was you and Dimitri who did that wasn’t it?
Jack Attridge
Well, I was in the other room, I can’t be seen as responsible for this.
Peter Molyneux
So this is our shredded… all of our shredded paper…
Jack Attridge
A recycled Christmas tree.
Peter Molyneux
Yeah. What a fantastic thing. I’m sort of… you know… there you go. Very good.
Jack Attridge
Festive.
Peter Molyneux
Right, now, you wanted to cover one of the features that you’re really keen on isn’t it?
Jack Attridge
Well, some people were wondering about the lovely landscapes kind of, you know, these steep mountains, ehm… and people started worrying about the idea that the followers settle on flat land. They build their houses on flat land so people started worrying we’re going to flatten it out and that’s not really the case. It’s more about the idea… There’s this almost a system of class in the game and the idea behind that is that if you build your home higher… of the houses on a lower plain than yours, then those people who will settle higher they see that difference and they’ll feel more privileged and they’ll give more belief, which is kind of you currency for building as a god, in a way. And so you’ve got this wonderful system there where people are encouraged to build up and down the mountain. You’ll get these wonderful civilizations built vertically like we have in the original prototype images. So that’s one thing to relief people of. And then…
Peter Molyneux
Alright. I like that.
Jack Attridge
And then, people were feeling worried about the thing that we’re doing with mobile, where we’re developing for PC and mobile simultaneously. And ehm, we’re not worried ourselves.
Peter Molyneux
Well you know, we’ve said it before haven’t we. It’s that the PC is our lead version and I still love the idea that, you know, if I’m not playing on PC I …………….… play Godus. And the only thing I can say to allay those fears is the prototype is being sculpted on the PC, it’s being sculpted around the mouse, the number of people in the prototype, the number of people we’re designing for is around the PC, ehm… all the actions are about the PC, you know, it’s PC, PC, PC.
Jack Attridge
Yeah, we have tricks up our sleeves to, you know, make sure that the PC experience is not going to be limited by mobile and yet we can still have that great experience for mobile. We have people here who at one point in time worked on getting Black & White from a PC to a Playstation 1. So, you know…
Peter Molyneux
Mmm... exactly. And it’s not a conversion, it’s just that… Here’s the thing, these days you can’t just talk about one platform, you’ve got to talk about many platforms and we make sure that every platform that Godus goes on is as best it can possibly be. I’d love to do PC, I’d love to do Mac, I’d love to do Linux and I’d love to do all that. Of course that’s going to mean we need a bit more of that valuable funding.
Jack Attridge
I mean, this prototype that’s been about one and a half weeks in development, with one programmer and one artist and the artist being part-time, already has 400 people running around this landscape. And let’s imagine 20 people over 9 months.
Peter Molyneux
I know. It’s amazing isn’t it.
Jack Attridge
It’s going to be brilliant.
Peter Molyneux
On that note, well was there another thing? Were you worried about micro-payments?
Jack Attridge
Yeah, so a couple of people, they read into the frowned upon word of micro-transactions and they started worrying a little bit that this is going to turn into some exploitative thing once the game releases and I just wanted to reassure people of that.
Peter Molyneux
Eeeeeeeeh… Eh eh eh… I mean, to be honest with you, it’s not really my field and ehm… you know, I, I, I, we haven’t really thought about any of that stuff. The only thing we love is, you know, we love, the idea, I love the idea I get a game I don’t get some sort of game which is kind of dressed up as a demo which a lot of kind of maybe free-to-play models do and I think that they do it pretty badly. But, there’s a long way to go, you know Jack, between now and release. And just what’s happened in this industry in the last 9 months has been astounding, you know, the growth of free-to-play and, you know, the kind of change in the social gaming space and I think it’s a brave man indeed that actually categorically goes out there and says we will have in-game purchases or we won’t have in-game purchases. I love the convenience of in-game purchases. I love things like ehm… ehm… Team Fortress’ toy box, the convenience of that, I love the idea that I don’t have to go out and enter my credit card statement before, I hate the exploitative nature of having in-game purchases.
Jack Attridge
Yeah. We’re not talking about designing around grinding and having monetization be a key part of winning at a game.
Peter Molyneux
No, I mean, I think there’s a very… In the industry at the moment there’s a huge focus on monetizing peoples’ impatience. And ehm… I just wonder if in a few years time we’re going to be looking back and wondering whether how, you know, whether that is the only way to monetize off people. As a consumer myself I like putting my money down on the table and saying that’s it, right, you know, I don’t have to, you know, I don’t have to think again. But I also like being able to add stuff in. If I’m enjoying stuff I like to get more of the stuff that I enjoy. All I’m saying, to be quite honest with you, we haven’t given it a vast amount of thought, maybe we should, maybe because our finance guy’s off to Australia on holiday. Not that I’m bitter about that at all, but that’s all his paperwork, shredded on the tree. Hahahaha. Let’s see how he enjoys it when he gets back. Let’s go and talk to Tim about some animation, because animation is where a lot of the character comes in. We’ve been thinking a lot today about some of the personality behind the characters. Look at this now, Fabs and Gary are talking to Pavle. Pavle has just come onto Godus and Paul over there I think is just coming onto Godus as well, so now we’ve got 4 coders on there. And we’re about to have… well, all the artists are working on it now as well. So, let’s talk with Tim.
Tim Meredith
Hello.
Peter Molyneux
Tim, you’re an animator.
Tim Meredith
I am.
Peter Molyneux
Some people would say that’s an easy life of just tweaking and pushing and pulling all day, but I’m sure there’s a huge amount of skill.
Tim Meredith
There’s a huge amount of work and time involved in it. Animation’s obviously moving things around but that’s only part of it. You need to make the model animated first. So, you have to take a model, like right here, and then you have to build a skeleton inside him so that he can be moved around.
Peter Molyneux
This is rigging.
Tim Meredith
This is rigging. So, a bit like a stop-motion puppet. You need an armature inside it to move it. And then you can animate it. So that’s what we have here. So this is a little follower guy from Godus… let’s turn this off… and this is an example of him running along and leaping over the layers, because…
Peter Molyneux
And of course, this is where game play comes in because I’m sure you would love and you could put a huge amount of, kind of expression into that, leaping over… But I think I’ve said to you no no hang on a second, this has got to be playable, so he has to keep his speed. And working with idiots like me makes your life harder doesn’t it?
Tim Meredith
Designers… designer’s king. It has to rule and it’s all very well me doing a very elaborate stop-run animation which takes him, you know, 4 meters to slow down. It might look beautiful, but it’s no good if that 4 meters puts him over a cliff.
Peter Molyneux
Let me ask you this Tim. You are animating and the animation brings a huge amount of personality, do you… If I was to draw, you know, if I were to have a scale here of, you know, comic… silly… funny versus sad serious and meaningful, where would you put these animations? On that scale. Obviously not at the extremes.
Tim Meredith
No, I mean, it’s going to be… For me personally it’s going to be… It’s going to hover around the middle, but it’s going to probably occasionally dip into each of them as necessary rather than spending all of its time being farcical or all of its time being incredibly somber. So there’ll be little peaks of cartoony and caricature and then there’ll be…
Peter Molyneux
And I suppose one of the problems here, another one of these problems is, at the moment, in this prototype, very unusually, there’s no face.
Tim Meredith
No face.
Peter Molyneux
No. There’s no details on the face is there?
Tim Meredith
No. It makes my work a lot quicker to do, because I don’t have to animate the face. But it’s give a scale. I mean, these guys are going to be… It’s all very well me showing you this on this size, but they’re going to be on this kind of size, so that’s another consideration on top of designing movement we have to think that these guys are tiny. Even on the largest of screens they are going to be quite small, so it has to… It doesn’t mean you’re doing less work because they’re so small they have to read. So what these guys do, this run, has to read from a distance.
Peter Molyneux
I see. Yeah.
Tim Meredith
Panicking has to read as panicking from a distance. We can’t have it only reading in the face moving like frowning to make him sad…
Peter Molyneux
And this is ehm… Here we’ve got an example where it’s just leaning on the side of humour isn’t it. If this guy is going to be suffering or if he’s going to die, is that where you’re going to pull the hard strings a bit?
Tim Meredith
Yes. I mean, to be honest, if say he’s going to die and it’s serious, it’s not a comedy death as it were then I wouldn’t do such a snappy dramatic thing, it would be more serious. If he’s going to drown… So if say his partner in the game or one of his friends is watching this, that’s when really…
Peter Molyneux
No. I totally agree with that. And what I love is… I think having humour is very important. Humour that trivializes things like death we’ll probably stay away from. And then down here you were doing story boards weren’t you?
Tim Meredith
As often as I can. These are some sequences actually for a Godus logo intro. Just some ideas really. And again it’s subject to designer’s king. Coming up with stuff, and some of this is farcical, again… this caricature as you were saying, the scale… and then we’ve got something very serious over here which is the death of this man’s family because of a meteorite and it would be a very very serious thing.
Peter Molyneux
How long would it take you to do these sheets?
Tim Meredith
These storyboards?
Peter Molyneux
Yeah.
Tim Meredith
Well these could take, you know, an hour to put together in a sequence. It really depends. Most of the work is thinking what it’s going to be rather than drawing it.
Peter Molyneux
So that means you don’t mind designers changing their mind all the time.
Tim Meredith
Oh, I love it. It keeps me on my toes. Keeps my senses sharp.
Peter Molyneux
Alright, let’s remember that shall we. In the months to come. Right, so there we go, that was talk about animation. We have done a roll out to the coding team, the entire coding team, of the entire feature set of the prototype. And that’s what I intend to run through in the next couple of days, exactly what the prototype is. Some very exciting things happening on how you sculpt the land. Tomorrow however we won’t be doing one of these videos because we’ve got the incredible honour of being on one of my absolute favourite podcasty-type things and that’s the yog cast. We’re on their live charity feed. We’re going to be talking some interesting stuff and we’re also going to be talking a little bit of a few other features of Godus. And we’re going to be talking with Simon and Lewis who are heroes of mine. So, we’ll speak to you from the yog cast tomorrow. Please watch it avidly.
Right, here we are on the next, I’m not going to say Design Update, I’m going to say Prototype Update, because we’re so focused on this prototype that is going to make something playable and we’re even considering releasing it aren’t we Jack?
Jack Attridge
If we get it done in time.
Peter Molyneux
Well, that’s making me very nervous. I’m not going to promise that.
Jack Attridge
Well the Kickstarter backers will get it after the end of the Kickstarter.
Peter Molyneux
Yes! Yes. Or maybe before the end of the Kickstarter.
Jack Attridge
Intriguing.
Peter Molyneux
Yeah. What do you think of our tree? It was you and Dimitri who did that wasn’t it?
Jack Attridge
Well, I was in the other room, I can’t be seen as responsible for this.
Peter Molyneux
So this is our shredded… all of our shredded paper…
Jack Attridge
A recycled Christmas tree.
Peter Molyneux
Yeah. What a fantastic thing. I’m sort of… you know… there you go. Very good.
Jack Attridge
Festive.
Peter Molyneux
Right, now, you wanted to cover one of the features that you’re really keen on isn’t it?
Jack Attridge
Well, some people were wondering about the lovely landscapes kind of, you know, these steep mountains, ehm… and people started worrying about the idea that the followers settle on flat land. They build their houses on flat land so people started worrying we’re going to flatten it out and that’s not really the case. It’s more about the idea… There’s this almost a system of class in the game and the idea behind that is that if you build your home higher… of the houses on a lower plain than yours, then those people who will settle higher they see that difference and they’ll feel more privileged and they’ll give more belief, which is kind of you currency for building as a god, in a way. And so you’ve got this wonderful system there where people are encouraged to build up and down the mountain. You’ll get these wonderful civilizations built vertically like we have in the original prototype images. So that’s one thing to relief people of. And then…
Peter Molyneux
Alright. I like that.
Jack Attridge
And then, people were feeling worried about the thing that we’re doing with mobile, where we’re developing for PC and mobile simultaneously. And ehm, we’re not worried ourselves.
Peter Molyneux
Well you know, we’ve said it before haven’t we. It’s that the PC is our lead version and I still love the idea that, you know, if I’m not playing on PC I …………….… play Godus. And the only thing I can say to allay those fears is the prototype is being sculpted on the PC, it’s being sculpted around the mouse, the number of people in the prototype, the number of people we’re designing for is around the PC, ehm… all the actions are about the PC, you know, it’s PC, PC, PC.
Jack Attridge
Yeah, we have tricks up our sleeves to, you know, make sure that the PC experience is not going to be limited by mobile and yet we can still have that great experience for mobile. We have people here who at one point in time worked on getting Black & White from a PC to a Playstation 1. So, you know…
Peter Molyneux
Mmm... exactly. And it’s not a conversion, it’s just that… Here’s the thing, these days you can’t just talk about one platform, you’ve got to talk about many platforms and we make sure that every platform that Godus goes on is as best it can possibly be. I’d love to do PC, I’d love to do Mac, I’d love to do Linux and I’d love to do all that. Of course that’s going to mean we need a bit more of that valuable funding.
Jack Attridge
I mean, this prototype that’s been about one and a half weeks in development, with one programmer and one artist and the artist being part-time, already has 400 people running around this landscape. And let’s imagine 20 people over 9 months.
Peter Molyneux
I know. It’s amazing isn’t it.
Jack Attridge
It’s going to be brilliant.
Peter Molyneux
On that note, well was there another thing? Were you worried about micro-payments?
Jack Attridge
Yeah, so a couple of people, they read into the frowned upon word of micro-transactions and they started worrying a little bit that this is going to turn into some exploitative thing once the game releases and I just wanted to reassure people of that.
Peter Molyneux
Eeeeeeeeh… Eh eh eh… I mean, to be honest with you, it’s not really my field and ehm… you know, I, I, I, we haven’t really thought about any of that stuff. The only thing we love is, you know, we love, the idea, I love the idea I get a game I don’t get some sort of game which is kind of dressed up as a demo which a lot of kind of maybe free-to-play models do and I think that they do it pretty badly. But, there’s a long way to go, you know Jack, between now and release. And just what’s happened in this industry in the last 9 months has been astounding, you know, the growth of free-to-play and, you know, the kind of change in the social gaming space and I think it’s a brave man indeed that actually categorically goes out there and says we will have in-game purchases or we won’t have in-game purchases. I love the convenience of in-game purchases. I love things like ehm… ehm… Team Fortress’ toy box, the convenience of that, I love the idea that I don’t have to go out and enter my credit card statement before, I hate the exploitative nature of having in-game purchases.
Jack Attridge
Yeah. We’re not talking about designing around grinding and having monetization be a key part of winning at a game.
Peter Molyneux
No, I mean, I think there’s a very… In the industry at the moment there’s a huge focus on monetizing peoples’ impatience. And ehm… I just wonder if in a few years time we’re going to be looking back and wondering whether how, you know, whether that is the only way to monetize off people. As a consumer myself I like putting my money down on the table and saying that’s it, right, you know, I don’t have to, you know, I don’t have to think again. But I also like being able to add stuff in. If I’m enjoying stuff I like to get more of the stuff that I enjoy. All I’m saying, to be quite honest with you, we haven’t given it a vast amount of thought, maybe we should, maybe because our finance guy’s off to Australia on holiday. Not that I’m bitter about that at all, but that’s all his paperwork, shredded on the tree. Hahahaha. Let’s see how he enjoys it when he gets back. Let’s go and talk to Tim about some animation, because animation is where a lot of the character comes in. We’ve been thinking a lot today about some of the personality behind the characters. Look at this now, Fabs and Gary are talking to Pavle. Pavle has just come onto Godus and Paul over there I think is just coming onto Godus as well, so now we’ve got 4 coders on there. And we’re about to have… well, all the artists are working on it now as well. So, let’s talk with Tim.
Tim Meredith
Hello.
Peter Molyneux
Tim, you’re an animator.
Tim Meredith
I am.
Peter Molyneux
Some people would say that’s an easy life of just tweaking and pushing and pulling all day, but I’m sure there’s a huge amount of skill.
Tim Meredith
There’s a huge amount of work and time involved in it. Animation’s obviously moving things around but that’s only part of it. You need to make the model animated first. So, you have to take a model, like right here, and then you have to build a skeleton inside him so that he can be moved around.
Peter Molyneux
This is rigging.
Tim Meredith
This is rigging. So, a bit like a stop-motion puppet. You need an armature inside it to move it. And then you can animate it. So that’s what we have here. So this is a little follower guy from Godus… let’s turn this off… and this is an example of him running along and leaping over the layers, because…
Peter Molyneux
And of course, this is where game play comes in because I’m sure you would love and you could put a huge amount of, kind of expression into that, leaping over… But I think I’ve said to you no no hang on a second, this has got to be playable, so he has to keep his speed. And working with idiots like me makes your life harder doesn’t it?
Tim Meredith
Designers… designer’s king. It has to rule and it’s all very well me doing a very elaborate stop-run animation which takes him, you know, 4 meters to slow down. It might look beautiful, but it’s no good if that 4 meters puts him over a cliff.
Peter Molyneux
Let me ask you this Tim. You are animating and the animation brings a huge amount of personality, do you… If I was to draw, you know, if I were to have a scale here of, you know, comic… silly… funny versus sad serious and meaningful, where would you put these animations? On that scale. Obviously not at the extremes.
Tim Meredith
No, I mean, it’s going to be… For me personally it’s going to be… It’s going to hover around the middle, but it’s going to probably occasionally dip into each of them as necessary rather than spending all of its time being farcical or all of its time being incredibly somber. So there’ll be little peaks of cartoony and caricature and then there’ll be…
Peter Molyneux
And I suppose one of the problems here, another one of these problems is, at the moment, in this prototype, very unusually, there’s no face.
Tim Meredith
No face.
Peter Molyneux
No. There’s no details on the face is there?
Tim Meredith
No. It makes my work a lot quicker to do, because I don’t have to animate the face. But it’s give a scale. I mean, these guys are going to be… It’s all very well me showing you this on this size, but they’re going to be on this kind of size, so that’s another consideration on top of designing movement we have to think that these guys are tiny. Even on the largest of screens they are going to be quite small, so it has to… It doesn’t mean you’re doing less work because they’re so small they have to read. So what these guys do, this run, has to read from a distance.
Peter Molyneux
I see. Yeah.
Tim Meredith
Panicking has to read as panicking from a distance. We can’t have it only reading in the face moving like frowning to make him sad…
Peter Molyneux
And this is ehm… Here we’ve got an example where it’s just leaning on the side of humour isn’t it. If this guy is going to be suffering or if he’s going to die, is that where you’re going to pull the hard strings a bit?
Tim Meredith
Yes. I mean, to be honest, if say he’s going to die and it’s serious, it’s not a comedy death as it were then I wouldn’t do such a snappy dramatic thing, it would be more serious. If he’s going to drown… So if say his partner in the game or one of his friends is watching this, that’s when really…
Peter Molyneux
No. I totally agree with that. And what I love is… I think having humour is very important. Humour that trivializes things like death we’ll probably stay away from. And then down here you were doing story boards weren’t you?
Tim Meredith
As often as I can. These are some sequences actually for a Godus logo intro. Just some ideas really. And again it’s subject to designer’s king. Coming up with stuff, and some of this is farcical, again… this caricature as you were saying, the scale… and then we’ve got something very serious over here which is the death of this man’s family because of a meteorite and it would be a very very serious thing.
Peter Molyneux
How long would it take you to do these sheets?
Tim Meredith
These storyboards?
Peter Molyneux
Yeah.
Tim Meredith
Well these could take, you know, an hour to put together in a sequence. It really depends. Most of the work is thinking what it’s going to be rather than drawing it.
Peter Molyneux
So that means you don’t mind designers changing their mind all the time.
Tim Meredith
Oh, I love it. It keeps me on my toes. Keeps my senses sharp.
Peter Molyneux
Alright, let’s remember that shall we. In the months to come. Right, so there we go, that was talk about animation. We have done a roll out to the coding team, the entire coding team, of the entire feature set of the prototype. And that’s what I intend to run through in the next couple of days, exactly what the prototype is. Some very exciting things happening on how you sculpt the land. Tomorrow however we won’t be doing one of these videos because we’ve got the incredible honour of being on one of my absolute favourite podcasty-type things and that’s the yog cast. We’re on their live charity feed. We’re going to be talking some interesting stuff and we’re also going to be talking a little bit of a few other features of Godus. And we’re going to be talking with Simon and Lewis who are heroes of mine. So, we’ll speak to you from the yog cast tomorrow. Please watch it avidly.