Watching the BBC production How Earth Made Us,
enjoyable given all the stuff I'm learning. But I wonder..
I'm trying to get to work on building a prototype for a game that covers some of the stuff from games you're probably never going to see again, SimCity, Spore, Rise of Nations, Transport Tycoon, Railroad Tycoon, all bundled in one.
All because the studios that made those games are extinct or have moved on to make garbage games that don't have the same scope, scale or impact of those mentioned above.
I guess it is a good thing I got to see this series first because so much of what should go into a game like that, for scope and scale, comes from the composition of the earth and the climate. Those things are ignored completely in games because they are all on such a small scale.
BUT some that do try to mess with large scales like Anno 1404 really push what modern computers can do.
It leaves me stuck. I mean I want to make a colony sim game where you play that middle to late part of Spore, setting up civilizations that trade with each other and get rich enough to explore other systems.
In the meantime stuff might happen that wipes out cities and civilizations like earthquakes, firestorms, changing wind patterns that annihilate crops etc. You don't get that in games these days.
Another little niggle is that they did mention slavery. It made me wonder. Even Star Wars mentions that Slavery was part of every day life. Spore vaguely alluded to it in that one species should have subjugated the others rather than wiping them out completely.
It's like during the build up to one species or culture dominating the others, there's that point where they reach a live and let live phase.. or they go to war. If they don't go to war but are totally dominating.. it's either slavery, interbreeding if possible, or they drive the weaker group out.
Also that the world isn't flat. There's a few things in gaming I consider to be sinful, clipping, no shadows in the mouths of characters, and the their worlds are always flat.
Spore addressed this by making the planets appear to be, if not actually be spherical. Minus enough physics to make it feel real, like volcanoes spitting rocks out that land on things and kill them, it still feels like a flat world.
It comes to the question of why if Spore was designed as a development platform, no other studios seems to have leveraged it?
Are they all flat-world book burners?
Given the opportunity to convert Spore into a proper sim game, it would be awesome for worlds to have rudimentary weather systems and geologies that had moving plat tectonics. It would mean fault lines for positioning mines, volcanoes, earthquake zones, while the wind and water create clouds and rain that create zones of fertility. Where everything is green you build a city. Not just in any random place as per Spore's kindergarten approach.
There needs to be a real scale and purpose.
It's things on those larger scales that I think should be available in a proper civilization game.
enjoyable given all the stuff I'm learning. But I wonder..
I'm trying to get to work on building a prototype for a game that covers some of the stuff from games you're probably never going to see again, SimCity, Spore, Rise of Nations, Transport Tycoon, Railroad Tycoon, all bundled in one.
All because the studios that made those games are extinct or have moved on to make garbage games that don't have the same scope, scale or impact of those mentioned above.
I guess it is a good thing I got to see this series first because so much of what should go into a game like that, for scope and scale, comes from the composition of the earth and the climate. Those things are ignored completely in games because they are all on such a small scale.
BUT some that do try to mess with large scales like Anno 1404 really push what modern computers can do.
It leaves me stuck. I mean I want to make a colony sim game where you play that middle to late part of Spore, setting up civilizations that trade with each other and get rich enough to explore other systems.
In the meantime stuff might happen that wipes out cities and civilizations like earthquakes, firestorms, changing wind patterns that annihilate crops etc. You don't get that in games these days.
Another little niggle is that they did mention slavery. It made me wonder. Even Star Wars mentions that Slavery was part of every day life. Spore vaguely alluded to it in that one species should have subjugated the others rather than wiping them out completely.
It's like during the build up to one species or culture dominating the others, there's that point where they reach a live and let live phase.. or they go to war. If they don't go to war but are totally dominating.. it's either slavery, interbreeding if possible, or they drive the weaker group out.
Also that the world isn't flat. There's a few things in gaming I consider to be sinful, clipping, no shadows in the mouths of characters, and the their worlds are always flat.
Spore addressed this by making the planets appear to be, if not actually be spherical. Minus enough physics to make it feel real, like volcanoes spitting rocks out that land on things and kill them, it still feels like a flat world.
It comes to the question of why if Spore was designed as a development platform, no other studios seems to have leveraged it?
Are they all flat-world book burners?
Given the opportunity to convert Spore into a proper sim game, it would be awesome for worlds to have rudimentary weather systems and geologies that had moving plat tectonics. It would mean fault lines for positioning mines, volcanoes, earthquake zones, while the wind and water create clouds and rain that create zones of fertility. Where everything is green you build a city. Not just in any random place as per Spore's kindergarten approach.
There needs to be a real scale and purpose.
It's things on those larger scales that I think should be available in a proper civilization game.
babilina:
