Nowhere: Incredibly Ambitious indie game concept

edited in General
Just watch this. I think it's bloody incredible. Achievable? Fun? Realistic? Damn I sure hope so!

Comments

  • Looks very interesting. Dynamic stories based on artificial social intelligence with human interaction is quite the thing to take on, although it's certainly possible. It's actually an idea that people have played with for a while now, although turning it into a complete game would be a first.

    I can see it being done as a preset story with 30 or so characters and a setting written, and then all the terrain modification, physics, and artificial intelligence being written to follow the storyline. Plop a player in and see what plot twists it takes, and when the player dies, rewrite all the AI's to follow the new story (automatically, of course) and then assign the player to a random character in the new story.

    Boy, the math that would go into THAT.
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    The aspect that interests me the most is the timeline and paths-crossing dynamic. When you play a different character on another timeline, you can run into your previous character, but that means you met the character you're playing now on a previous play.

    How do they determine what you're going to do on this play through? Do they just let AI control the characters you haven't played yet? There is no way you would follow exactly what an AI character would do, so the timeline of that character would be drastically different from what you've previously experienced.

    To explain it better: Let's say on your first play through you kill a soldier. On your second play through you are now playing that soldier you killed. You know what you did previously, so you know to dodge the bullet that would have otherwise killed you. This breaks the timeline that previously existed, so are you now playing on an alternate timeline? That wasn't made clear to me in the video.
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    I really like those graphics, and they'll definitely have something cool looking by the end of the project.

    But they don't have a game yet. And I don't place any faith in ideas.
  • Well actually they have an alpha up, I haven't tried it yet but they do have something up. I doubt it's anywhere near the scope of what they're talking about though, I assume it's just a pretty graphics tech demo...

    So yea, I'm skeptical, but I really wish it will come true :)
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    I think it'll crash and burn. That scope is huge, and if they think two people can build and test and tweak and balance that sort of complex emergent system (no matter how abstracted it is) in two years and port it to a bunch of platforms, then all power to them - I dunnae think it can be done.

    I hope they can prove me wrong, though, because I love the idea and the aesthetic.
  • Things like: Your character grows up and possibly becomes a father, a engineer, a beggar etc as far as I am aware hasn't been achieved (and been enjoyable) in many games at all ever.

    It sort of happens in the Sims... and they only focus on that in the Sims, and that game was headed by Will Wright...

    And I think there are even more stripped down Sims-like games on mobile and facebook.

    But doing it in a first person game, with a bunch of other big features, is more difficult.

    Maybe they can theoretically do it. But the probability is that it'll sort of end up sparse or just plain unplayable.

    I think it'd be more exciting if they took that visual blob generation tool and made a much simpler more abstract game instead. Like a 3D osmosis, or a trippy Starseed pilgrim plant simulator.

  • I must admit that playing a blob-hobo harassing passers-by with his blob-cup and insistently blob-mumbling "spehr ah dollah mate?" through his blob-beard could be fun... For a few minutes.

    I like the society-management-as-a-giant-living-blob-city idea. I think that's an interesting game in itself.
  • I'd feel much more optimistic about their idea if they were prototyping the whole social interaction system + living world thing + spawning in different times thing + living multiple lives through the same setting thing, instead of doing the easy stuff of writing a graphics engine and all that jazz.

    Way to intellectually masturbate by implementing known algorithms and totally ignore the hard algorithms that nobody's got guides for that totally underpin your whole game concept there. They're not testing their main failure points at all: It would be way more motivating seeing squares arbing about somehow.
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    It looks pretty, and I do hope that they make something of it: it looks like a very unusual idea, something quite different to the majority of indie games (let alone AAA games), and I'm a big fan of diversity in games. Furthermore, I think that it would be heartening to me to see a project of this scope succeed.

    That said, I have significant doubts: as has been pointed out, there seems to be little gameplay thus far, and the development of a custom engine is somewhat of a red flag (for one thing, I'm not convinced that what I saw there isn't achievable in an extant game engine). It also seems to be an awfully large and broad design, which is a little worrying.

    While the gameplay described is pleasantly unusual in concept, I don't think that it's something that I'd likely play; nevertheless, I can see it finding players.

    Miltage brings up an interesting point regarding the "timelines": I do wonder how they intend to deal with player choices in a given timeline interfering with choices from a previous playthrough; I'd be rather interested to hear that!
    I think it'd be more exciting if they took that visual blob generation tool and made a much simpler more abstract game instead. Like a 3D osmosis, or a trippy Starseed pilgrim plant simulator.
    I partially agree: I think that I'd be rather less excited if they scaled it back to the degree that you seem to be proposing (although I don't know Starseed, and a quick search failed to bring it up), but scaling it back a bit may well be a good idea (I hesitate to suggest just what might be cut, not knowing how the developers feel about the various elements).

    [edit] I found Starseed Pilgrim, but am not quit sure what to make of it from a quick look. ^^;
  • I think what they have is largely a marketing choice - pretty graphics drive kickstarters (well, croudfunding) and that seems to be what their gameplan is. Now whether that means they do or don't have the ability to complete the project, I don't know, but based on this, they're probably gonna be funded.

    Now would they have gotten more if they spent their time more on block-graphic prototyping of the game mechanics instead of the pretty graphics? I doubt it, as the majority of the funding, I assume (wrongly or rightly), comes from a pleased crowd rather than an impressed dev community, right?
  • @Tuism: I actually don't think they're going to get much funding at all... The pretty graphics part they showed had nothing to do with the neat animated graphics they started the presentation with, the ones that needed the gameplay. If they can build those animations for the video, they can build gameplay around those animations. I don't know why they're not doing that...

    Also, they're offering a beta for pre-ordering on their site (it's not really crowdfunding if you do it that way) betas imply something playable. I don't think that people want to pay to walk around and edit some glowing spheres ;)
  • If crowdfunding is the goal, and presuming that they're not in a position to wait longer in order to first produce gameplay and then add in some graphics, perhaps a half-and-half approach might have been better: develop at least some of the gameplay, and develop enough of the graphics that it looks somewhat okay but not as pretty as it does now?

    On another note, might they not have been further along -- that is, have both pretty graphics and some gameplay -- had they built on an extant engine?

    You may be right, however; perhaps developing the graphics first improves the group's probability of gaining funding, which might be particularly important at this point.
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    @Tuism: I actually don't think they're going to get much funding at all... The pretty graphics part they showed had nothing to do with the neat animated graphics they started the presentation with, the ones that needed the gameplay. If they can build those animations for the video, they can build gameplay around those animations. I don't know why they're not doing that...

    Also, they're offering a beta for pre-ordering on their site (it's not really crowdfunding if you do it that way) betas imply something playable. I don't think that people want to pay to walk around and edit some glowing spheres ;)
    While I agree with what you're saying, I think crowdfunding seem to work more like impulse buys... Well, at least the lower tiers. People see something, get emotionally moved by it, and toss in a few bucks and tweet about it. They're much less likely to do that with a block-graphic rudimentary prototype...

    And another factor of this is probably the game type - if this were a short-play type game, it would probably be much better to start with a prototype. As it is a MASSIVE SCOPE game, it probably couldn't be captured well enough given the time they've had to work on the prototype - imagine if Elite: Dangerous went to pitch with block graphics and a prototype that had spaceships flying and a couple procedural planets... Etc. I think people would have been much more meh about it than they are now.

    Sad but true?
  • I really don't think it's crowdfunding if they're selling tiers of access to something on their site. It just means they're selling something without an actual thing yet, crowdfunding to me is about those limited time campaigns where people need to make X pledge amount.

    Introversion didn't crowdfund, neither did we. We just turned on pre-orders and then a paid beta. I think pre-orders are a completely different beast to crowdfunding.
  • I think pre-orders are a completely different beast to crowdfunding.
    That's an interesting point, why do you say so? Just to me I can't see the difference - they put out word that they're making something, and am asking money for it by the power of... representation, and marketing, I suppose.

    Whether those funds come in because of a working prototype or an inspirational video or because you got some famous team or whatever hardly matters to people who've paid, really.
  • @Tuism: Huge difference! A crowdfunding campaign is limited in time, you want to leap out of the gate and have a really strong case for why this thing you're trying to make is going to be awesome. You've got to manage press and coverage so that they all peak at the same time (when the campaign launches) you've got to have compelling tiers and plans to update and basically babysit the campaign day and night until it completes. Then you fuck off and work on your game, but from all accounts it's exhausting while you're doing it.

    An on-site pre-order is a lot less managed: You're offering something to people that they might want, but there's no real time deadline, so they're only going to bother picking it up if they think it'll be fun. This is why having a paid beta helps a lot, because it's something people can get as soon as they pay, it's a tangible reward. Plus you're not managing this campaign the whole time, you're actually working on your game - you just have to do it so that people can see cool stuff happening. Your goal is to build up word of mouth and fans, that takes time and continuously visible development effort. That's a different kind of exhausting, but it's not the mad rush that a crowdfunding campaign is.

    The two things are very different from a marketing and development perspective and I think that Nowhere has them badly mixed up.
  • Ah, I see the difference now that you explain it like that - the key difference being the deadline aspect which of course affects the rest of the structure.

    I wonder if that sort of urgency vs long term interest thing is largely noticed by the general public of potential backers. I do see the difference in that people are less likely to jump in and back as soon as they see it if it's not a limited time thing ("i'll come back and have a look later since there's no deadline"... And then they never come back again), but I wonder statistically what it does for a pitch. (and of course it differs from one to the next)
  • @Tuism: The deadline and the "If you don't make your target you don't get ANYTHING!" angle of crowdfunding - so people have to throw everything they have into it, otherwise they don't get to work on the game afterward. A pre-order system is much more forgiving to the dev, you get the money as people place their orders.

    One is about shoving a sales pitch in people's faces, the other is about building a long term case to buy something early and help people working on it.
  • Ok so, basically, they're trying to create life. In a two years time.
    Good luck !
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