Mindflock.com

Ok, so I understand its hard to tell what the game is meant to be like right now. Nothing is really set in stone and you cant tell from a single image what Damzel is meant to be about. But let me at least describe for you what its not about. Its not about FPS style escort missions! There was always a risk when talking about using a first person view, that it would evoke the first person shooter gameplay to mind. Add on protecting someone and its pretty natural to think “escort mission”. But as I woke up this morning I realized there might be a way to explain why game will feel different than that.

I’ll use the old PC game “Space Hulk” to explain what I mean. I know many of you wont remember this game, but certainly many of you will be aware of the setting.

Space Hulk PC

I use the example of Space Hulk here to explain that in the game, you are controlling squads. Ok, in Space Hulk you controlled individual marines, but in Damzel you control squads of up to five agents. Space Hulk built up a lot of atmosphere with its presentation, but I’m interested in the tension of the game here. It was no dumb blast-all-the-aliens game here. You had to carefully plan your way through the Hulk, trying to get to an exit point. You had a squad, you had weapons and individual loadouts etc. But its the tension that I’m trying to get across here.

If people go into the game thinking “first person shooter” then I’ve lost. Because it wont feel that way at all. But there’s a dilemma in that I really love the immersion that the first person viewpoint brings. I also enjoyed the Brothers in arms squad control mechanic enough to want to try and recreate it somewhat for this game. So in effect the emphasis is not on an individual so much as it is on the arrangement of squads. Hopefully gameplay videos and teasers will be able to explain this when the time comes. But it does still worry me that people dismiss the game without really understanding where its coming from. The depth that comes from the sheer number of possible configurations of squads, enemies, world and protectee (I definitely need a better word for them) is staggering. But I think thats for another post.

Hope this clears a few things up and explains the game a bit more. I highly recommend reading the peice on Rock Paper Shotgun about Space Hulk, it was one of my favourite games of that era (I still have it in a box somewhere I think).

Here is the link again

Thanks for reading.

Wolfire's Black Shades

Trawling through some of the comments on the kotaku link to the Damzel page. I noticed a couple of things:

1. People think it sounds like wolfire games Black Shades
2. People think that escort missions suck

So to clear things up a bit. This game really isnt like Black Shades, although its pretty easy to see why you would think that. Black Shades did inspire us to go the FPS route. But the focus of the game is very different. You’ll have to wait and see. The other thing is that escort missions typically DO suck. But they suck for a very different reason than you think. The reason is very much tied to the typical FPS gameplay style. To be honest, the first person viewpoint is one area of the games design thats a bit risky. The idea is to implement a brothers-in-arms style first person view, where you control your squads. The real aim here is to make things feel immersive, whilst providing some tactical interest and strategic depth. But you could play the game entirely outside of the first person view (we’re going for a hybrid model) to control the squads in a far more Syndicate style of play.

The real issue for us design-wise is to make sure that the whole package feels right. Its also the fun of developing our own game! Suffice to say that of course there are potential risks involved with the gameplay and references to be drawn to other games, but you have to have faith that the game that comes out at the end avoids those pitfalls and is its own thing. Not much point in being and indie developer if you can’t deal with a bit of risk right?

Thanks all for the interest in the game though. It feels good to know people might give it a shot.

Damzel is definitely not a first person shooter. Nope, definitely not. Which is weird, because right now it feels a lot like Quake used to (circa Quake 3 with the jump pads). Strangely enough, when you implement NVIDIA’s Phsyx physics engine and use their character controller API, its just unbelievably easy to make a first person shooter. Ok, so you dont get the fancy shmancy graphics from Call of Duty MW2. But the feel of running around a 3D world in fast mouse-based control of a character definitely feels right.

Of course the biggest problem (and question) is wether players really DO care about the fancy-schmancy graphics more than I think they do. I’m betting that a viable game world full of genuinely interesting characters will trump the whole bleeding edge normal-specular-offset mapping stuff. Its not beyond us to do the graphics stuff technically, but frankly the amount of money needed to do that high end artwork just isnt there. So procedural content generation, animation, social simulation and whatnot will have to make up for it.

Thats not to say that the game will eschew graphics entirely. Aesthetically the look that will eventually make it into the game will be quite unique. Its all programmer art right now and it shows. But further down the development pipeline the aesthetics will be set more in stone. I can offer one teaser though.

Ok, I’ve said too much already. Suffice to say, with the right artist, things will be quite “unique” aesthetically.

BTW: I’m about to go and look for a youtube widget for wordpress, but in the meantime, check out the youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/zoombapup