Creatures Online Conference Slides Malkin | 7/10/2019 | 4 | Julien Hamaide, formerly of Fishing Cactus, dropped by the Discords recently and shared the slides from a conference presentation he gave on Creatures Online: Waking up a decades-old AI. It's interesting to see the similarities and differences to C3/DS. |
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Hilarious, and confirms exactly what I thought CO was going to be.
Genome defined poses? Nah, let's use bog-standard pre-baked animations shared by all species. Not even prodecural ones.
Natural actions that happen in real-time? Nah, not flashy enough! Let's make it into a cinematic the user has to watch ad-nauseum any time the norn decides to press a button!
Let's cover the screen with coin counters, mail icons and shop buttons! Gotta have those MTX! And on that note, let's give the norns a "community" drive, because as a mobile clickfest, the user might appreciate the norn harvesting the coins for them occasionally. Of course, once this drive is filled, no more auto-coin collecting... it's back to being a clickfest.
Oh and you have to place objects on a tile-based grid, because having unlimited freedom to decorate just wouldn't be incentivizing enough for people to spend money to unlock bigger areas!
I'd tell them to do a rude thing with a bouncy beach ball, but sadly if they use it too often it would disappear. Then they'd have to spend valuable coins to buy a new one from the Mall. Or better yet, spend diamonds (eggs?) for an equally limited-used golden ball.
What absolute garbage this game would have been. Gooooooooood riddance.
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Reading this fills me with an incredible sadness. The tale of Creatures is one of troubled development, loss to the sands of time, and longing for what might have been.
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