More on Lionhead's Design Experiments

[GameBanshee News]

Shacknews provides us with more coverage of Peter Molyneux's GDC discussion about the strength in experimentation when developing video games.

Fable 2, the fact that we did put those innovations in there... we didn't have to do that, but we only did that because we experimented in smaller test-beds first.

If me as a designer and us as a design team, if we didn't have these experimental groups here, then we just wouldn't have been able to experiment with what we did in Fable 2.

...

The dream of Concrete... this industry talks so much about sharing code, sharing engines, sharing AI... but maybe there's some fundamental things we should do before we can do that. And so we created this framework called Concrete, and the idea with Concrete is if you create any asset, and by an asset I mean anything from a piece of graphic to an animation, if there is a framework in it that allows that asset to essentially talk to other objects, and be compatible with other objects, then this dream starts to become a reality. And this dream was, imagine if you had a game like Fable, and a game like Black & White, why shouldn't you be able to literally physically pick up a tree from Fable and put it in Black & White?

The big dream is that me as a designer would then be able to pick the landscape from one game, the trees from another game, the villages and their AI from another game, combine them all together and make a game in 48 hours. Obviously that is still an absolute dream, and nowhere near a reality...

[fable]

Quote:

The big dream is that me as a designer would then be able to pick the landscape from one game, the trees from another game, the villages and their AI from another game, combine them all together and make a game in 48 hours. Obviously that is still an absolute dream, and nowhere near a reality...

Not to mention, about as creative as Henry Ford's harnessing of the conveyor belt for his first car plant.

I wonder if Molyneux listens to himself? That would explain a lot.

[Aqua-chan]

Ugh. I take Peter Molyneux's inane gibbering for what it's worth, which is less than a grain of salt. As someone who intends to enter the developer industry, the sheer suggestion that of creating a game by taking all the "goods" from other games like a patchwork quilt is insulting.

It's like setting about writing a manuscript, saying, "I'll take Terry Pratchett's jokes, the concept of Dante's Inferno, and the relationship drama of a Daniel Steele novel and put it together. That'll be a great story!"

Consoles don't cause bad games. Bad developers cause bad games.