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The Making of Black & White
Chris writes "GameSpot has posted a feature story that details the entire development process for Peter Molyneux's new PC game Black & White. There are a lot of quotes from Molyneux as he takes you through the whole three years they spent making the game. A lot of interesting stuff about the philosophical underpinnings of how the game judges you good or evil."
The game was, in fact, released too soon. Even though it was postponed back and back and took three years, it's still quite buggy. Framerate never goes above 31 fps (with the reccomended system, plus an extra 128 ram on top). The non-traditional interface is great.. At least until you realize you need to get to a main menu instead of being forced to watch the ten minute intro again after a crash corrupted your most recent save and the program assumed that you wanted to start a new game. It's cool until you uninstall and reinstall to replace corrupted files, taking careful checks to ensure you don't lose your saved game, only to find out that you lost all your creature AI. It's cool until you realize that you only really have the creature for 2 of the 5 lands, since you don't really use him on the first, he gets kidnapped in the second, and there's the 'level 5 creature bug' which utterly destroys him in the last level. It's cool until you realize that the villagers can't do anything except deforest and overpopulate, and you have to spend all your time completely micromanaging them. It's cool until the side quests completely disappear the same time the plot does. It's beautiful eye candy, it's completely engrossing for the first several hours, it leaps across traditional boundaries, but it just, unfortunately, didn't quite make the last hurdle.
B&W looks like one of the most original games to come out of any development house in many years. The FPS, RTS, Roleplaying (sometimes just repackaged adventure games) have all been beat to death. Great houses like Looking Glass have fallen off the map. It's good to see something like this be created, I look forward to it being the best seller of 2001 and significant for many years after.
I also wanted to point out the article, it is one of the best written (and longest!) that I have seen on any website or magazine in a long time. We should thank the author Geoff Keighley for taking the time to really interview the people at Lionhead and understand what it took to bring this game to fruition. The article was so interesting there was no way that I could go without reading it until the end.
Many people here post flames when writers and journalists get computers and technology wrong, we should be thankful when they get tech right.
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
On page one, the article says "three years... team of 25 people" My first thought was to run the numbers: break-even is 273,000 units (conservative estimate). No way this gets funded. No way. This game would have been rejected again in the first meeting when there was no "good" answer to the question "what genre is it?"
Page two explains why the game got made: it was self-funded.
Its really a shame that the "big companies" in the game industry can't support efforts like these. Black and White looks like its going to be an amazing game, and it would have been a great thing for a publisher to have participated in its development.
Good to see that better and better games are being developed.
He is right in a way. Movies do not see the flickers, because if you look at a single frame of film it is blurred, like taking a picture with long exposure and people move inside of it. It has transistion from the last frame, the current frame, and the nextframe all merged into one. The blurred goes away when the frames are played in sequence at the correct speed. The effect is moving pictures. If you take a frame of computer game, from a game there is no blur. Every single picture is sharp and crisp. To get a non-jerky motion to show you need to push a video game to at least 60 fps. The extra frames give a more fluid motion, because the eye cannot pick up each frame in its entirety, but sees parts of each frame and combines them into a composite picture of sorts. The effect is that the motion is fluid. Film doesn't need extra frames but computer games do.
I've been tring to work out what the most bizarre thing my creature is willing to eat. So far, I've seen my monkey eat people, whole pine trees, live cattle, it's own dung, and a fence.