There is a tiny amount of new Topia info in my blog from a few days ago with more to follow soon. In the meantime I have been working on getting large herds of creatures interacting in a (hopefully) convincing way. All in the kind of painstakingly optimized code that was used to get a few hundred characters moving at once on an Amiga 20+ years ago. Of course our target platform is something like 100x as fast as an amiga...
I still think it kinda looks like Black and White for the PC. I loved that game and a touch screen would be perfect for that type of game. But very interested to see how and what this turns out to be.
Hey buddy! I gotta say, Topia is lookin' uber cool. And beautiful too! Really looking forward to this one. Good luck with the rest of the build. On another note, just thought it worthwhile to say that Ground Effect is one of my top ten iOS games since the App Store opened. I'm diggin' the subtle similarities between Topia and the GE landscapes. By the way, it'd be utterly fabulous if Ground Effect underwent a Retina Display (and Game Center) makeover! Simon
Sounds great, just make the speed adjustable, allow commands when paused, so it's a game of planning rather than a clickfest.
as far as I know, its all going to be real time, you are watching animals react to your changes in the land. Glenn can probably explain that better though, but the intention is that you are changing a world and watching how things react/cope to the changes. You are trying to build large herds of friendly animals, and keep them away from predators.
Real time is fine, games like this pretty much have to be real time, but there is a fundamental difference between games where time flows at a fixed rate and the challenge is to do everything you want fast enough, or games where you can choose how fast time flows and the challenge is to decide what to do.
Now that we've had herds working for almost an hour I thought I'd post a few quick screen grabs of animals doing their thing. Movie coming very soon hopefully. We have 2000 of these guys moving around at 30FPS. More technical info about this stuff in my blog very soon.
Why not use the unreal engine? Just customizing the world then partly controlling it's inhabitants will get boring in a week, so I suggest a sid miers civilization like game, where you could slowly guide it's inhabitants to become an advanced civilization.
No idea but he is kind of right... Look at pocket god: it's awesome one week, you stop and play one week again when there is an update. The content is to repetitve ( i do not which to start a debate, its just my oppinion.).
As always, Josh and crew impress. This seems like a breath of fresh air in an environment that has become increasingly filled with match-3s, cute-animal-with-catapult-physics titles, etc. So how are you "protecting" your creatures? will you use the land to create physical, vertical barriers? Will there be dynamic day / night (think Minecraft)? I see day and night in the screenies, but what will the actual practical differences be for players? Will your creatures be able to evolve actively / fluidly, or are there "levels" and loading screens? [I know the thread mentions "real-time," but is that "real time gameplay...separated by loading screens"? Think about a gameloft title like Sacred Odyssey, where you run across a field and it pauses for 5-10 seconds to load the new area.] Will there be "hero" creatures or avatars (think Black & White) or are all creatures created equal? I'm very curious in this title, and if anyone can bring this to the platform with guns blazing and a quality experience, it's CM. Best of luck and keep us informed!
well thanks! appreciated. I'll say something though. This whole idea is inspired essentially by my flight back from GDC this year, was looking out the window of the airplane and thinking, what if there were this giant hand that could shape the world. Then I thought - wait a minute - Glenn! Glenn is like the Grand Master of all things Terrain. So really this was like an experiment for shaping land and things growing. A lot of you seem to just want a black and white clone or populous clone but this is not that. This is a world shaping, creature growing thing. Future versions could have those type of features, but we are developing the tech now to be used later for other things as well.
Wow this game is coming along great! I can't wait to see how it will actually play. The landscape shaping seems to work well. Is there any way to trigger natural disasters like earthquakes or tsunamis to wipe out herds? That would be pretty cool
And it was like a very cool fit to what I wanted to do next. I'd been playing with landscapes for well over 20 years. The original Populous came from an Isometric Landscape editing demo I developed with no idea where it was going. I've created other game engines where editing the world has been a big part of the gameplay (Magic Carpet, Dungeon Keeper) and put generated landscapes into a lot of other games (most recently Ground Effect) but always felt that the original Populous idea of a game where it drove the whole thing was a criminally under explored area of gameplay. I'd always wanted to update the idea with new tech. Over the years 'God Games' evolved into RTSs and the term evolved to mean games where you micro-manage little people. Josh and I had been talking about doing something together ever since Ground Effect and Ravensword were released (we 'met' in each other's threads in the upcoming games forum in '09) and his idea was a perfect match for what I'd been thinking about, in the back of my mind, for a very long time. Another thing that had bugged me for 20 years was the fact that while machines were maybe 50x faster, there were very few games with 50x more stuff happening so I really wanted to match that indirect control with lots of AIs. The third thing is, I didn't want to be tied down to some up-front design. In my experience nothing original was ever done that way, simply because cool ideas that emerge cannot be followed. Josh was completely up for working this way. What we have now is the result of experimentation, feedback, endless IM chats. This game has been designed on the fly with the current build (at any point) as the main influence on the design. We don't know exactly where it's going but we are both now sure it's going to work, even with no real 'game' in there yet just stroking the landscape and watching the herds form and disperse can steal a couple of hours and the game is going to be so much more than that. Feel free to keep telling us what we should be doing though if it amuses you
