One thing some articles I've read misscharacterized, from being at the conference myself. They say Wrights title of "The Future of Game Content" was a guise under which he presented Spore. I really don't think that is completely true. Wright made good points about game content and time to develop. His solution was demonstrated by Spore. Spore uses user shared content and procesdural content to overcome the current limits.
With other EA divisions claiming 150 person teams, Wright showed their was another way, keeping teams smaller, and allowing user driven and procedural content to fill the gap.
This was a theme at the GDC this year. In his talk a couple of days ago, Tim Sweeny talked about how good tools can also keep team size down, to a max of 50 in his case. 50 is still large, but if it gets a 25 mil $ game down to 10, thats much more profit to the studio and developer.
Game had a toon feel to it, but not completely toon rendered - sort of a mix.
Seemless, though slow in places, with Wright interacting with the character as he talked. From this, think it was playing in real time, and hence a fairly polished pre-alpha.
Presentation was at 10:30. At 12pm, it was due to be reshown at a theater open to Expo attendees. This was CANCELLED at the last minute, after some people had been packed in for half an hour. An official stood up and said it had been pulled, as EA said it contained confidential info. Kinda dumb, as 90 minutes before they'd shown it in a room with at least 500 people, cameras flashing all the time!!
Nightfall was a Mac only RT3D puzzle game that came out about a year ago. No violence, many puzzles, and real physics (you could climb, build staircases from stones..).
We designed it to make sense in this environment. If you couldn't get somewhere, it was pretty obvious why not - i.e. there was a 10 foot wall in the way. However, the new gameplay was that you could 'get physical' and work around the problem.
The clock tower in Myst is a good example. Why can't I just walk or swim out there if I can't figure out what this puzzle does? You can do some of that in Nightfall. Why be stuck with the designers intuition as the only route, when you can find your own way through or around? You just design the environment so if there is something crucial it is hard to avoid and pretty obvious the player should do it.
I think this is the promise of RT3D mystery games - use your intuition, and have more than one way to progress through the same space. (that and random circumstances, so each game is unique - how many times did you replay Myst?).
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One thing some articles I've read misscharacterized, from being at the conference myself. They say Wrights title of "The Future of Game Content" was a guise under which he presented Spore. I really don't think that is completely true. Wright made good points about game content and time to develop. His solution was demonstrated by Spore. Spore uses user shared content and procesdural content to overcome the current limits.
With other EA divisions claiming 150 person teams, Wright showed their was another way, keeping teams smaller, and allowing user driven and procedural content to fill the gap.
This was a theme at the GDC this year. In his talk a couple of days ago, Tim Sweeny talked about how good tools can also keep team size down, to a max of 50 in his case. 50 is still large, but if it gets a 25 mil $ game down to 10, thats much more profit to the studio and developer.
No screen shots (sorry!)
Game had a toon feel to it, but not completely toon rendered - sort of a mix.
Seemless, though slow in places, with Wright interacting with the character as he talked. From this, think it was playing in real time, and hence a fairly polished pre-alpha.
Presentation was at 10:30. At 12pm, it was due to be reshown at a theater open to Expo attendees. This was CANCELLED at the last minute, after some people had been packed in for half an hour. An official stood up and said it had been pulled, as EA said it contained confidential info. Kinda dumb, as 90 minutes before they'd shown it in a room with at least 500 people, cameras flashing all the time!!
Nightfall was a Mac only RT3D puzzle game that came out about a year ago. No violence, many puzzles, and real physics (you could climb, build staircases from stones..).
We designed it to make sense in this environment. If you couldn't get somewhere, it was pretty obvious why not - i.e. there was a 10 foot wall in the way. However, the new gameplay was that you could 'get physical' and work around the problem.
The clock tower in Myst is a good example. Why can't I just walk or swim out there if I can't figure out what this puzzle does? You can do some of that in Nightfall. Why be stuck with the designers intuition as the only route, when you can find your own way through or around? You just design the environment so if there is something crucial it is hard to avoid and pretty obvious the player should do it.
I think this is the promise of RT3D mystery games - use your intuition, and have more than one way to progress through the same space. (that and random circumstances, so each game is unique - how many times did you replay Myst?).