Lionhead Studios Design Experiments

[GameBanshee News]

Lionhead Studios CEO Peter Molyneux displayed some of the company's design experiments at this week's Game Developers Conference.

One of the experiments that was a "real success" according to Molyneux was "Fisticuffs Crescendo," which was made in the prototype engine and featured two flat-shaded polygon models in fighting poses. The idea dealt with one-button combat, and depending on where an attacker was positioned, different context-sensitive actions would occur. If the character was too far away to punch, they'd automatically kick a brick at their opponent instead, or use a nearby wall to launch off of. The exact system would have been too expensive to add to Fable 2 when it was being made, but it did greatly inspire the inclusion of its own one-button combat system.

Another experiment, one that "didn't work," was "The Room." It showed a simple, dimly-lit living room, and a cursor that could create blocks of gray clay. By clicking on the clay, you could add more blocks to it and create shapes. As Molyneux added a few blocks, he changed the resultant shape to a brown color, and suddenly it became a television. Another square shape turned into a bowl of oranges (Molyneux: "of course! What else would it be!"). The demo also had portals, much like the ones in the game Portal (though The Room was made before Valve's game was a reality), but represented as two tall mirrors. As Molyneux dropped an orange into one mirror, it came out the other. But then, as he pointed out, the larger mirror also made the objects that traveled through it larger -- he repeatedly dropped the orange through the mirrors and watched as it grew bigger and bigger until eventually the pure paradoxical power destroyed the room.