1/4/16 Back in the office and ready to rumble!

I can answer these!

The UI design is actually pretty interesting, surprising because they kind of came up with it themselves whilst I was away. I believe, I might be wrong because I have only observed from the outside of the process, that your UI is a halo above your head that appears when you tilt your head up - miracles appear and you grab a 'miracle' to cast it down onto the ground below. They seem to be going for the Zeus effect, but in terms of using 'physical' space, it seems really interesting and non-intrusive. It's early days and subject to my savagery in picking apart design issues, but it looks promising.

Ideas discarded so far, no fog of war - we added a villager exploration/memory system, so the NavMesh on the ground is 'scouted out' by villagers who plot their paths to the nearest resources. They don't know these routes until they're told to go somewhere, this might mean that the towns are aware of their surroundings past navigation - a town can 'see' the forest, but doesn't know how to get there until a pawn journeys to it. Think grey squares that turn green as a pawn begins to move across them, essentially carving a route for other pawns to use. So 'fog of war' isn't really a thing per say.

I know that idols are in, idol selection is in, the first ability to 'take over a town' is in (by slamming your idol down), the towns also grow or shrink independent of you - I think they ripped out my gesture draw miracle system and I had it noted down that people here didn't respond well to that anyway.

I can't think of any specific ideas that are discarded, I think I discarded the 'falling to Earth' intro sequence because it's actually horrible to drop people in VR. I think we're also still waiting on the engine to make headways for terrain sculpting, it's not discarded but we're totally focused on NPC town/God interactions. Champions and direct orders to pawns is basically on the fringes of being out - towns are currently sending people out to forests on their own, you don't really need to tell them to do that. Gameplay area is also too big right now - we have it around 2x2km with a giant mountain, it's not really working as well as I hoped.

For debugging we have a bunch of controls mapped to the controller buttons, but they're all going to go or be replaced. Also war, as an executed concept, is definitely phase 2 - we have the groundwork of how villagers gather and build now, we want to keep expanding on that to tighten up the growth, reaction and adaptation of NPC towns.

Character wise, the big headed characters were my suggestion and the art team ran with it. I wanted rag-dolled big-headed 'pawns' that would be contrasted by more realistic/grounded animation. They're not going to have cute animation sets, instead I wanted the player to be able to see/recognize them, for their profile to be visible at a distance and for them to die/be thrown in fun ways. They're subject to change, by adjustments and better stylization, but we needed the meshes to develop the animation sets. I think they sit, idle/chat, walk, run, plow and chop at the moment. I have a personal aversion to them doing anything cute, the buildings are remaining less cartoony, the landscape will be more stylistic (I think they're aiming for something similar to The Long Dark and Massive Chalice). Art direction might iterate, evolve, change but for the prototype it needs to be a constant reference point, so we can profile platforms, add VFX, check how many towns/villagers we can have and develop the tech/AI/engine stuff accordingly.

I actually think that we're going to find a mid-point between the Godus humans and the 'nubs' that our people call the puffy big-heads, which might be the best option. If people here want one or the other, we can adjust to that.

Animation sets will play a role in the feel or story, but the story might be more emergent. Story is currently definitely taking a back-seat but it's in scope, we just need to know what we have to facilitate a story before we think about the content. I think audio is in the same boat, we're thinking about audio but it's definitely far behind every other branch (audio people will hate this).

Hi Petra. Good to see you guys are back!

Regarding your question. How about that public Trello board or whatever it is you guys are using for project planning and progress tracking? Is that something that can be shared yet?

Thanks for the answers, I appreciate that!

That halo that you described, will you be able to grab spells from it without looking at it if you've memorized where on the halo they are?

How much will be possible in terms of facial expressions on the 'nubs'?

One general approach I'd have if emergent gameplay and story is the intent of the design is that you add more detail into the systems within the world than you think you'd need because the detail of the systems within the world determine how much CAN happen. The less detailed a system, the less ingredients for emergent gameplay or story. And this isn't just for gameplay systems, but also animation systems, facial expression systems, NPC generation systems (visualy), they all increase the options of what CAN happen.
Pay close attention to No Man's Sky to see if they run into the problem of not enough being able to happen. Their entire design depends on it. And from what I'm seeing so far, Genesis may also heavily depend on it. Especially if the player is supposed to project their own meaning onto the nubs of the game world.

Quick side note, I'll write another answer when home, I hate that people call them Nubs. ****ing art team people squeezed that name through on their own. Nubs. I wanted to call them Pawns.

I agree on the Nubs. If you're gonna go with that, might as well call them Nipples.

I liked gestures too, we might find the happy point;

How do people feel about finding symbols, like signs, around the world that if you draw once you can unlock as a gestural power? You need to draw it, it unlocks, and maybe then 'collects' to the GUI halo above?

Ba'al I'm going to check feasibility of the mash-up of powers; I knew this was going to happen eventually, which is why I was proactive in having design change their path on 'wood can burn' into defining objects as 'can burn' or 'can x, can't x'. This means when, for example, if you were to mix electricity and fire, a 'pawn' is still defined as 'can burn, can electrified', which means an electrical fireball will still shock/burn a pawn - or anything else that can be set on fire or shocked. I *think* that we can lerp between two particle emitters, like a fiery lighting ball, or have two overlapping emitters running at 50% spawn rate (so a fireball with electrical sparks).

I'm using easy examples because this is basically a mechanic that would then impact bigger decisions, like if there was the ability to 'seed' a town (which right now there is a miracle that spawns a town wherever the ball lands for debugging) then what happens when you 'mix' fire and town spawn? Do you spawn really angry warrior town, or buildings on fire? Fascinating to explore this route.

Maybe a combination between gestures and the halo system (provided you can access the halo without looking at it. You can store a miracle on the left side of the halo, right side, or the middle (so it's easy to distinguish between grabbing the right, left, or middle miracle) which takes less time than making the gesture first. But there's thus very limited room on the halo. And perhaps the spells you carry on your halo also influence how the NPCs see you.

Also, those spells you choose for the halo might have passive effects...

If you do quests it like skyrims dragon shouts it could be cool, not sure how you would implement that in a god game though.

I'm much more a proponent of having to work hard to master the use of miracles than having to work to find them or earn them in the first place. The latter makes it feel like a collecting game, the first makes it feel like a skill/strategic game.