Notes from the Slippery Slope, Part 1
- Chris
- Introversion Staff
- Posts: 1172
- Joined: Sat Nov 25, 2000 7:28 pm
- Location: Cambridge, UK
- Contact:
Notes from the Slippery Slope, Part 1
One thing that perhaps isn't clear to regular readers is that although Subversion is my focus, i'm actually involved in a number of different projects at any one time. Chief amoung them is codenamed Multiwinia - our new Multiplayer game set in the world of Darwinia, and probably the next game we release. For this game i'm taking more of a producer/director role, rather than taking personal control of everything as I usually do. This is an experiment for us, to see if we can produce two games at once, and there's no shortage of extremely talented people working on Multiwinia - Gary is working on the game itself, Johnny is handling networking and multiplayer, and Stepan is doing the DirectX graphical work. The only part i'm personally handling is the new control method for managing your army. We've also got Alistair coming back to work on the audio (can't imagine anyone else ever doing our audio to be honest - where do you find someone who can do audio like Darwinia and Defcon?)
I think in the past we've misrepresented Multiwinia as some sort of Multiplayer addon to Darwinia. The reality is that Multiwinia is a totally new thing - it will be sold as a stand-alone multiplayer game and the original Darwinia won't be included. (We may end up bundling Darwinia in the same box, but that's yet to be decided, and it will still be a seperate product).
The original game Darwinia doesn't really suit multiplayer that well - fundamentally its about fast arcade action with the squaddies, punctuated by long periods of relative calm while you do the more sedade resource gathering, building capture etc, and prepare your next strike. This gives the single player game a nice pace - you marshal your forces and strike the next target, and the red enemy rarely does anything to proactively disrupt your plans. It's calm and serene, with moments of extreme concentrated violence, all under your control.
In Multiplayer, most of that goes out the window. Squaddies are far too powerful, and the indirect officer control ends up getting in your way, because you need closer control of your Darwinians during battles when your opponent is a real person. Herding Darwinians around with goto orders only works when your opponent isn't proactive, as in the Biosphere level from Darwinia.
In order to fix this we've been making some radical changes, and we've absolutely no problem with slaughtering any sacred cows that get in our way. We're aiming for a fast, brutal and hilarious multiplayer wargame, set in the world of Darwinia. Some people may be concerned about this - people who are particularly attached to some element of Darwinia perhaps. But Darwinia is Darwinia, and Multiwinia is something else. It's not a sequel and it's not an addon pack. It's an entirely new game, set in a world we've seen before.
A big problem we are having right now is what to call this game. Naming our games is always difficult, and codenames often last through 80% of the project lifespan - Terminal, Future War, Wargames. In this case it's even harder, since the world already has a name. The codename Multiwinia has stuck since the start, but it's not what we want - this name only means something to people who've played Darwinia. We are fairly sure we don't want the word Darwinia in the main title at all. We want something that represents the fun crazy action multiplayer game we are trying to make.
Other ideas we've had:
Stickmen Slaughter
Red versus Green
Attack Vector
Green War Machine
We'd love to hear your suggestions. In fact the main purpose behind this blog posting was to throw the issue open - tell us what you think, and if you have any ideas of your own please post them in here. If we see something we really like...well, you could have named Introversion's next game. We're willing to consider anything at this time.
I think in the past we've misrepresented Multiwinia as some sort of Multiplayer addon to Darwinia. The reality is that Multiwinia is a totally new thing - it will be sold as a stand-alone multiplayer game and the original Darwinia won't be included. (We may end up bundling Darwinia in the same box, but that's yet to be decided, and it will still be a seperate product).
The original game Darwinia doesn't really suit multiplayer that well - fundamentally its about fast arcade action with the squaddies, punctuated by long periods of relative calm while you do the more sedade resource gathering, building capture etc, and prepare your next strike. This gives the single player game a nice pace - you marshal your forces and strike the next target, and the red enemy rarely does anything to proactively disrupt your plans. It's calm and serene, with moments of extreme concentrated violence, all under your control.
In Multiplayer, most of that goes out the window. Squaddies are far too powerful, and the indirect officer control ends up getting in your way, because you need closer control of your Darwinians during battles when your opponent is a real person. Herding Darwinians around with goto orders only works when your opponent isn't proactive, as in the Biosphere level from Darwinia.
In order to fix this we've been making some radical changes, and we've absolutely no problem with slaughtering any sacred cows that get in our way. We're aiming for a fast, brutal and hilarious multiplayer wargame, set in the world of Darwinia. Some people may be concerned about this - people who are particularly attached to some element of Darwinia perhaps. But Darwinia is Darwinia, and Multiwinia is something else. It's not a sequel and it's not an addon pack. It's an entirely new game, set in a world we've seen before.
A big problem we are having right now is what to call this game. Naming our games is always difficult, and codenames often last through 80% of the project lifespan - Terminal, Future War, Wargames. In this case it's even harder, since the world already has a name. The codename Multiwinia has stuck since the start, but it's not what we want - this name only means something to people who've played Darwinia. We are fairly sure we don't want the word Darwinia in the main title at all. We want something that represents the fun crazy action multiplayer game we are trying to make.
Other ideas we've had:
Stickmen Slaughter
Red versus Green
Attack Vector
Green War Machine
We'd love to hear your suggestions. In fact the main purpose behind this blog posting was to throw the issue open - tell us what you think, and if you have any ideas of your own please post them in here. If we see something we really like...well, you could have named Introversion's next game. We're willing to consider anything at this time.
Last edited by Chris on Wed Apr 09, 2008 3:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.
- shinygerbil
- level5
- Posts: 4667
- Joined: Wed Dec 22, 2004 10:14 pm
- Location: Out, finding my own food. Also, doing the shinyBonsai Manoeuvre(tm)
- Contact:
-
- level0
- Posts: 1
- Joined: Mon Aug 30, 2004 4:07 pm
- shinygerbil
- level5
- Posts: 4667
- Joined: Wed Dec 22, 2004 10:14 pm
- Location: Out, finding my own food. Also, doing the shinyBonsai Manoeuvre(tm)
- Contact:
I say go back to the name Future War, or Digital War. Those who've been around long enough will the the nod to the old name of Darwinia during development, and since Multiwinia grew out of Darwinia, but is totally different, as different as Darwinia was to the original idea of Future War, it's a fun 180 turn around.
Or something.
I could just be rambling. Sorry shiney new graphics card is distracting me.
Or something.
I could just be rambling. Sorry shiney new graphics card is distracting me.
Uplink help: Read the FAQ
Re: A digital nightmare, Part 1
Does that mean it will be OpenGL and DirectX, or Windows only this time?Chris wrote:Stepan is doing the DirectX graphical work.
-
- level1
- Posts: 38
- Joined: Wed Jun 13, 2007 1:05 pm
- Contact:
- shinygerbil
- level5
- Posts: 4667
- Joined: Wed Dec 22, 2004 10:14 pm
- Location: Out, finding my own food. Also, doing the shinyBonsai Manoeuvre(tm)
- Contact:
-
- level1
- Posts: 38
- Joined: Wed Jun 13, 2007 1:05 pm
- Contact:
-
- level1
- Posts: 38
- Joined: Wed Jun 13, 2007 1:05 pm
- Contact:
Who is online
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 9 guests