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