I'm looking forwards to No Man's Sky
This is a pretty video-heavy post. I wanted to keep the numbers down but it's nice to be able to directly show what I am talking about. Sorry about that! Keep that tab-opening finger on the trigger!
I recently realised that my younger self spent a lot of time in some very interesting virtual spaces. If you'd followed those links you'd have found that they are all different games which involve sitting in a spaceship, zooming around and blowing things up. They belong to a fantastically nerdy game genre, 'Space Sims'. The wonderful coincidence that space is very empty and that 90's video cards could only manage a few thousand triangles meant that these sort of games were everywhere. As the 00's rolled in, and as Star Trek stopped being shown on TV for the first time in decades, this genre died out miserably leaving only few poorly translated games coming in from the East.
Time's moved on still, and very recently mysterious market forces (crowdfunding) have seemingly brought this genre back to life. Very many of these games are on my radar, but I wanted to mention one that really brought me back in terms of what it is trying to be, and I want to say what exactly it brought me back to. Here's another video:
This trailer was shown at the VGX game awards near the end of last year and is one of the new space sims. Here's what you just watched. First you saw some wild claim about an atomistic simulated world. What's meant by such trailer speak is that the designers are going to throw some dice and save all the numbers that come up. Those numbers determine if some planet you see has air made up of nitrogen and oxygen (as in Earth) or sulphur, carbon dioxide and nitrogen (as in Venus or Hell or something). It probably decides what the soil of that planet is made of as well. The recipe then dictates that you skip a few billion years of planetary/biological evolution and make a guess about what the plants, animals and geology of the place will look like. The hope is that this gives you some gorgeous alien sunsets, mountain ranges, and trees (the designers claim trailer shows some pretty earth-like planets on purpose, there's very much more to this than it shows). Do this dice-rolling enough times and you'll have the richest of environments to discover chugging along in your space vessel. How great is that?!
Unlike the other space sims coming out, this looks like it'll let you explore and take pictures. I love virtual photography (here are some geniuses and here is my steam profile). If the visual aspects of the game are physically based enough, the sort of pictures to come out of it will be truly magnificent. If I could do it, I'd love to pull off something like this myself. Critically, it's looking like the exploration, or video game, aspect is going to get some love from the designers, and I think this is great and distinguishes it from just being some visual space software. The marriage of both an entertaining game and beautiful picture generator is something I'm looking forwards to a lot.
So how does this remind me most vividly of my awkward teenage past? I once religiously played a non-violent exploration game by an Italian programmer in a corner of the internet called Noctis IV.
The narrative, which is really very external to the game and was made up in a community effort, is that you're the last of an alien cat race wondering around the galaxy in a spacetime-warping spaceship. You spend your time naming discovered planets and making notes on them, taking screenshots and uploading them to the web, and making sure you don't run out of fuel. It had this really forward thinking metagame where you'd be able to discover planets logged by other people, and read their notes in-game. This was a very simple multiplayer component where, although you weren't able to be in a game with others, you could stumble upon interesting planets found by other players. You may have noticed that the video had no sound, that's because the game didn't either! It looks incredibly primitive for this day and age, and honestly definitely was for when I was playing it as well. It was a 320*200 pixel window into another world and it absolutely consumed my life. I got involved in and loved the community that grew up around it, and getting to know so many people from around the world was pretty wonderful for someone with my challenging background. I have many good memories of practically growing up with these people on the other side of my keyboard.
Although Noctis IV was a long time ago, and life is bigger than the internet-dependencies I once had, I still look fondly back at the gaming experience itself and hope that sometime soon I can recreate some of those in a totally new way.
I recently realised that my younger self spent a lot of time in some very interesting virtual spaces. If you'd followed those links you'd have found that they are all different games which involve sitting in a spaceship, zooming around and blowing things up. They belong to a fantastically nerdy game genre, 'Space Sims'. The wonderful coincidence that space is very empty and that 90's video cards could only manage a few thousand triangles meant that these sort of games were everywhere. As the 00's rolled in, and as Star Trek stopped being shown on TV for the first time in decades, this genre died out miserably leaving only few poorly translated games coming in from the East.
Time's moved on still, and very recently mysterious market forces (crowdfunding) have seemingly brought this genre back to life. Very many of these games are on my radar, but I wanted to mention one that really brought me back in terms of what it is trying to be, and I want to say what exactly it brought me back to. Here's another video:
This trailer was shown at the VGX game awards near the end of last year and is one of the new space sims. Here's what you just watched. First you saw some wild claim about an atomistic simulated world. What's meant by such trailer speak is that the designers are going to throw some dice and save all the numbers that come up. Those numbers determine if some planet you see has air made up of nitrogen and oxygen (as in Earth) or sulphur, carbon dioxide and nitrogen (as in Venus or Hell or something). It probably decides what the soil of that planet is made of as well. The recipe then dictates that you skip a few billion years of planetary/biological evolution and make a guess about what the plants, animals and geology of the place will look like. The hope is that this gives you some gorgeous alien sunsets, mountain ranges, and trees (the designers claim trailer shows some pretty earth-like planets on purpose, there's very much more to this than it shows). Do this dice-rolling enough times and you'll have the richest of environments to discover chugging along in your space vessel. How great is that?!
Unlike the other space sims coming out, this looks like it'll let you explore and take pictures. I love virtual photography (here are some geniuses and here is my steam profile). If the visual aspects of the game are physically based enough, the sort of pictures to come out of it will be truly magnificent. If I could do it, I'd love to pull off something like this myself. Critically, it's looking like the exploration, or video game, aspect is going to get some love from the designers, and I think this is great and distinguishes it from just being some visual space software. The marriage of both an entertaining game and beautiful picture generator is something I'm looking forwards to a lot.
So how does this remind me most vividly of my awkward teenage past? I once religiously played a non-violent exploration game by an Italian programmer in a corner of the internet called Noctis IV.
The narrative, which is really very external to the game and was made up in a community effort, is that you're the last of an alien cat race wondering around the galaxy in a spacetime-warping spaceship. You spend your time naming discovered planets and making notes on them, taking screenshots and uploading them to the web, and making sure you don't run out of fuel. It had this really forward thinking metagame where you'd be able to discover planets logged by other people, and read their notes in-game. This was a very simple multiplayer component where, although you weren't able to be in a game with others, you could stumble upon interesting planets found by other players. You may have noticed that the video had no sound, that's because the game didn't either! It looks incredibly primitive for this day and age, and honestly definitely was for when I was playing it as well. It was a 320*200 pixel window into another world and it absolutely consumed my life. I got involved in and loved the community that grew up around it, and getting to know so many people from around the world was pretty wonderful for someone with my challenging background. I have many good memories of practically growing up with these people on the other side of my keyboard.
Although Noctis IV was a long time ago, and life is bigger than the internet-dependencies I once had, I still look fondly back at the gaming experience itself and hope that sometime soon I can recreate some of those in a totally new way.
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