Peter Molyneux Explains the Design of Black and White

[Music] basically over the over the over the years Great Britain has actually had some very very talented developers um people like jez s Tony Cryer David braen Jeff M these are the people that I grew up like just just they were the stars when I was first um playing games and these guys became very very famous in England in France Germany and Italy and Spain however very very few British developers really make a name for themselves here in America and no calling yourself Lord British that doesn't kind judging by how many people there are here today actually you can see that that our speaker has actually already started to change all of that in the time that um in the time that he's been making games um he's already accomplished a lot more than most video game designers you know would ever hope for he he can be as creative as he likes

he can design absolutely anything that comes into his mind he's extremely talented and so people are dying to work with him any publisher out there would be really happy to fund a project with his name on it and most importantly when he makes a game he decides whenever the publisher is going to get to ship it which is a great situation I personally look up to him as a true Visionary in this business I recently spent a few hours with him in the um in the Cheers bar in Boston and if you get to spend some time with him you'll realize how much he truly loves this industry his passion for creativity and and his interest in new design ideas is really infectious and and as he's demonstrated in the past with with populace theme park with um Dungeon Keeper and night with black and white I think he's shown that he's never scared to steer his ship into uncharted waters Peter is an Advisory Board member of this conference and we are truly honored that he's taken time to fly over

here to share his insights with all of us so if you join me and a round of applause um I'd like to welcome Mr Peter [Applause] Malo well thank you very much Dave and I could endorse and repeat all the things you say about Dave he's been a Visionary to me as well what I thought we'd do today is um i' what I'd like to is uh show you and share with you some of the Visions uh that been going through my mind when I've uh been creating uh the latest game called black and white and what I'm going to do is um go through a number of uh slides that really give an indication of what that Vision was and where it came from so start off the first one who I am um I started in the industry back in 1987 I started in the industry because I was starving and uh running running a

company and thinking how the hell am I going to get enough money uh together to uh to uh eat the next meal and I've been very very lucky to work with some extremely talented people and my first game ever was a game called populace um and I had no idea absolutely no idea that what I was creating uh other people would even like let alone let alone by and that's where it all started and since then the games industry has been a total total passion for me and I think I hope you'll realize that from what I'm saying today so where did the black and white inspiration come from um just set the scene a little bit I started a company up called lion head um almost three years ago now and the first game that lion head did had to be very impressive and I've always got my inspiration from a number of sources films and music are terribly terribly important to me in particular there were

two films that that gave me inspiration for this the first one which I'd love to show you a clip from but I haven't got it is a film called King Kong the original 1933 film of King Kong with a huge ape which unbelievably the filmmakers made you care about and I wept like a baby with in the final scene when the uh little bip planes were flying over and shooting King Kong and I thought when I was thinking about the next game God if I could weep over a giant GI ugly creature like that that is just an amazing emotional pull so that was the first film that inspired me the second film was an episode of The Outer Limits I love science fiction like I'm sure we all do we wouldn't be in this industry if we didn't and I'm going to show you a tiny little clip and when I saw this scene the idea for black and white popped into my mind um it's it's not a very long clip uh and it's um the outer limits there's a basally an episode

called the San Kings and this guy finds his alien eggs and brings them up and realizes that they have intelligence and it was when he realized that they had intelligence and this very scene here where he was standing in front of the cage and there was this little this these little creatures just running around um his feet that I realized that that was the feeling of power and it's a feeling of power that I really wanted to imbue um imbue to uh to people that played uh that played games and also the feeling of fun as well that they React to what you do that they uh that they seem to be intelligent if you like and it's this seeming to be intelligent uh bit in the game that I really really enjoy but this scene coming up here is really what I want games players to feel when they play black and white I want them to feel what it would be like to be a god amongst these masses and it's the expression on this guy's face in a a second that when you see it is uh kind

of what I want people to feel when they play the game um he's going to make the expression in a second it's that expression there that I really wanted to wanted to get get from people so that is a a huge experience the other experience is uh about being a child when you're a kid you know those images in my mind are still incredibly strong and I remember a key key moment in in my childhood was when I was walking through the woods one day and I happened upon an ants nest like every kid has ever ever happened upon I happened upon an ants nest and of course the very first thing I wanted to do is pick up a stick and just destroy as many of these little suckers as I possibly could so I got the stick and rummaged around in there but actually I found that you know if I dropped a little sweep by the side they'd come out and they'd start eating

the sweet and it kind of in a way was like that film clip but when I was a when I was a kid the fact that you had this world this little ant colony World which you were sort of dealing and interacting with with which again is just a feeling of of immense pleasure for me and also the other thing is a a toy called action man now most of you probably as kids had action men and if you're anything like me you were unspeakably cruel to your Action Man um after a while you know my action man ends up ended up torched with a blowtorch um was the final thing that I did with him but it was this these scenarios that I used to make with a kid with my action man always involving him dying in some horrible horrible way and it's those marriage between those two which uh which is particularly interesting so those are two big experiences so if you you can get the feeling that I wanted to create a world but also from the action man and the King Kong side I also wanted to create a creature

something that seemed real and what I'm going to do now is just go back through a few of my games and just um just just have a look at those games and what mistakes that I've made in those games and how I hope black and white will Rectify some of those mistakes so the first game I did was populace well the game was really really simple you just clicked raised and lower land and you had little people reacting to it but the big problem with popular the the huge problem the problem that always came when I showed it to any members of the press is there was no story there was 500 levels which you played through and I have to confess now this is a confession that I'm going to make that those 500 levels were all completely randomly generated it wasn't that I handcrafted each one of the 500 levels and personally personally tweaked it all not at all in fact it was a column of numbers

which I um which which were filled in which generated the world and the biggest confession of all was the data discs if if anybody you played called The Promised lands what I did was take that column of numbers and reversed it round and that was the balancing on the promised lands and I'm ashamed about it and I feel I need to need to confess about it and I'm really really sorry but there we go the other problem with populus was the fact that it was repetitive gameplay it was the same thing over and over again now that's fine that's cool it's cool to do that but also one of the one of the real excitements for me about playing games is Discovery is discovering that I can get more powerful is discovering more and more features in the game and once you played the first level of populace that was it really so you know there's certainly room for improvement there now the next game I'd like to talk about is um a game called Power Monga it was um probably the big

biggest disappointment in all of the games that I've done it was a real world that I was trying to build um you know that was full of little people again and they went out and did their jobs but it didn't have a story again another problem it was a succession of levels it was a terribly over complicated interface if you can just see down in the down in the bottom section the number of icons that were around there I think there was something like 32 icons now asking somebody to remember 32 icons on what they do is just too much you know one of the things that I try and think about these days is to realize that in your short-term memory in the average human short-term memory you can remember seven things and that's if you're pretty exceptional if you're not exceptional it's sort of probably more more like five things and so once you've ask someone to do the sixth thing to remember where the sixth thing is it's an effort and it just you feel like oh

God now where was that icon what did that icon do where was that person in the world and that is the sort of the sort of things that we have to really really think about now so a little bit of inspiration on the interface side from uh from Power Monga and then Syndicate which is um you know was a really which was a little bit different for me one of the things you'll notice with all these slides is that uh there is a common link between all my games and the common link is Little People every single game I've done has a little person in it somewhere in in there even even Syndicate even Magic Carpet which seem to be flying around on a carpet and shooting down monsters they've all got little people in there now the cool thing about Syndicate yes it was an action game um set in a simulation a simulation of a city but again we I tried to sort of think about a story for it and the story of behind Syndicate was that you had these chips that you could uh plug into

your head but it was completely outside the game once you got into a level then that was it you were playing a shooter up essentially there wasn't any of the story um sort of uh sort of coming out um uh within the gameplay side and part of that was the limitation of the systems that we were playing on now and part of that was that you know I had always focused on the gameplay element and not the story element I now think that that's a little bit of a mistake I think it's the story and the narrative is as important as the gameplay mechanism providing the two the two marry themselves uh together then came Magic Carpet um it was uh really the first 3D game um as such um had a fantastic 3D engine written by uh a CH a brilliant uh person called Glenn Corpus who worked with me on all of the games and really he excelled himself here we still had little people as you can see down the bottom there I sneaked them in there at

the last moment I just couldn't bear having a game without them um and the trouble with the only problem with Magic Carpet its interface was quite simple but it was repetitive gameplay again and I tried to construct opponents I tried to encourage the team to construct opponents but really they lacked personality they didn't there wasn't any way for them to express their personality to you and to offer challenges to you and it turned out that towards certainly towards the middle and the end of the project it was just too darn difficult one of the things that I again I try to think to myself is we're not trying to build games that beat people we're trying to build games that entertain people and that means you have to make a game challenging absolutely but not challenging to the point where it's just so darn difficult that you just can't complete it the perfect game I believe is one where you can go through and you can play it and you can have a challenge you have to think about

a challenge a little bit but you get to solve it and there's some there's some many many fine game examples um of those the next game which was um madly successful in Japan and in Europe but not very successful in America at all was a game called theme park where you design and built your own theme park the big problem here was again no challenges but the graphics were just too childish for the US market you know when people saw it they actually thought it was a it was uh a um an entertainment product um sorry an entertainment product and there were you know a little bit turned off by the graphical um portion of it also there wasn't nearly enough destruction in it I should have put in just these death defying roller coasters that just killed off half the people that that traveled on you know I should have put in food poisoning at the at the hamburger store I should have had you know I should have had Mass global deaths on the uh on the extreme fast

rides and it would have been so much cooler and uh you know anyone making a theme park game out of there just go do it you know the disasters when you're sitting on a roller coaster you're always thinking is this sucker going to keep keep together before I I reach the end of the ride and wouldn't it be cool to have a game where well it didn't quite do that and the last game that I did and probably the game I made the biggest mistakes over uh was a game called Dungeon Keeper I thought that concept for a game where you play the bad guy where you play you know everything you do has to be bad you're the big opponent in the in the um in this dungeon was a very cool concept but it was just an awful interface I mean the icons there were tons of them I mean I I managed to double the number of icons that uh that ponga had to um to some some 64 different icons um the game features were were to hidden I mean I'm I don't

I've never seen a hint book that actually uncovers all of the all the tricks uh within the game that you could do I mean there there was a little chea in there that enabled you to uh to have the uh there was a character called the mistress and there was a cheat in there enabled her to come uh become naked which I don't think anybody ever found and uh it's all very well putting these little Easter eggs in there but if they're so darn hard to find then uh you just wasted your time in the graphic artist time again no opponent personality it would have been so cool in that game to have the heroes the people trying to conquer your dungeon to have real personalities that you know that were you know there were Kings of the land that were trying to to to send questing knights in there you could have done a lot I could have done a lot more with it and what it ended up with is a sort of dungeon Fest if you like where you could uh you could uh you could build your dungeon up put your creatures in there and fight against someone else

it could have been an awful lot more so those are the sort of influences bubbling around in my mind and that led um us to the first meeting of lion head where we sat down and I knew I kind of knew what black and white must have a sort of musthave list and the first in the must have list was it had to be so impressive the games industry is a deeply scary place and I've walked around the RO around GDC this time and it terrifies me the quality which all you guys are putting out is amazing and you know as a small ster you have to compete with that and you have to compete with it on a level and make something which is is fantastic in every aspect fantastic Graphics fantastic gameplay fantastic story fantastic narrative and it's just a really really really tough thing to do but with all that fantastic things that we can put together together all this complexity we

can put together one of the things it must have it must be simple to play it's got to be simple to play you all watch MTV now and MTV has destroyed your minds completely because your attention span is that is is about 10 seconds now that means I've got 10 seconds 10 seconds to firstly explain about what the game is 10 seconds to to persuade you to to play the game 10 seconds in uh in uh to show you something cool happening in the game and that is tough to do and the secret is Simplicity not dumbing down but just pure Simplicity the other thing as you can see from my past games what it had to have what black and white had to have was a compulsive story but not just any old story a story and this was real ambition of mine a story which W would be unique to you and this is what presents black and white the uniqueness

to the player himself and that's what computer games can do the Fantastic thing that they can do is they can we can make games now that are unique to each person that plays it and there is no other entertainment Med medium in the history of our civilization that's had the ability to do that since the tribal Storyteller who used to go from town to town and tell his stories and what he used to do a tribal Storyteller used to go from town to town town and explain and tell a story and if you got a laugh he changed the story a bit if he got he got people crying he's changed the story a bit and that's what we can do in the games industry we can look at players and if we're clever we can modify our games and change our games to enable everybody who plays a game to have an entertaining experience absolutely fantastic it had to have state-of-the-art technology state-ofthe-art gameplay state-of-the-art AI engine state-of-the-art physics engine state-of-the-art uh Graphics 3 3D engine state-of-the-art interface all of those

and it had to be unique and original but it had to be understandable you know uniqueness and originality has its risks and the risk is that you make something so unique that nobody understands it and that is a huge huge problem so the next thing I did was that we did at lion head it was to make a team and it's all very well for me to stand up on this forum and say all these things but it's all of these people here on this list that make this game not just me and they're all totally totally brilliant people and the one we constructed a team the first thing that we did was to make what's called a test bed version um which I'll show you now this is the first screenshot of black and white that I showed some 18 months ago um you'd be pretty disappointed if that that was all you were going to see today I'm sure but it really this test bed allows us to try

some of the game mechanics out when you're making something new it is incredibly hard and difficult to um to actually wait until the end of the project before you test the most risky elements of it it's far better to actually make the most graphically horrible thing that you could ever imagine and in fact if you look very closely at this those little dots down in the middle are little Sprites from theme park the building things from another game that I was working on the landscape is obiously no engine at all it's just a a it's it's just a mesh but what you could do in this test bed is play the game you could try some of the elements out and that's so darn important if you're if you're going to spend um if you're going to spend years literally years of your life U working and playing on the game so that led to the design of um black and white what is it well what

black and white is is a role playing game where you play the role of a God as you play a role of the God as a story unfolds you find you have the ability to um to take one creature in the world and I'll be demonstrating this in a minute one creature in the world and nurture it and grow it up and give it whatever personality you like it is set Within an amazing uh an amazing simulated World which is the most realistic which I could possibly imagine at the moment and a world that allows you to do absolutely anything you like him it's a game which hopefully balances itself and what and that's a very very bold claim and you know I hope it's going to come off but what it does is tries to Pace itself um by looking at the way that you're playing the game and it's a game that allows the player to be himself in other words

within this world within the story you can be as evil cruel nasty and Despicable as you like or you can be wonderfully kind generous and caring as you want and it's those two those two opposites and everything in between which came up with the name of black and white from the darkest deepest black to the whitest white bright is white and what black and white doesn't do is say thou shalt be Thou shalt be good Thou shalt be evil Thou shalt be this character Thou shalt be that character it allows you to be whichever character you like and these shots down here are the first conceptual shots if you like of the game now the one in the middle is the um is a character from Dungeon Keeper and you can just see probably the just tiny little dots down the bottom and that's the feeling of scale that I got from King Kong you know this feeling that this is your creature he's not a little thing he's a hugely powerful

incredibly incredibly strong creature and you can make him whatever you like and there on the uh left or right is the ape creature the first idea we had uh uh for a creature in the game and the uh image on the left is your Citadel where you reside so let's before we have a look at the the uh the demo uh let's a look at some of the technology within black black and white it's all very well having this great game uh the you know these great ideals for a game but you need some great technology to make that happen firstly there's a multiv view 3D engine that allows you to view the world from any um aspect you like secondly there's uh what we're calling multiscaling AI which allows you to um which allows you to see this world in simulation um at any point uh also that AI is applied to the

creature the creature is certainly the most amazing AI that I've ever worked on I I think it's some would say foolishly ambitious but I can really honestly say that the creature that you're going to see today is the most amazing creature that I've certainly seen in any games industry and it even stands up against some academic AI a world-class physics engine um I wanted you the things that you move around and uh that you manipulate to actually be real physics objects so you're going to see some a real physics engine working a multi-threaded story a multi-threaded interactive story interface which allows you to Trigger story events um when you like and also allows there to be a whole a huge number of different solutions to that uh um Story the idea of gesture recognition that you can make shapes and the game recognizes which shap sh you make which activate certain uh powerups within the

Spells an iconless interface which allows you to manipulate the world without the need of the Clutter uh of my previous games um things like real time lip syncing and emotion syncing which means that the creature's face when you interact with him will actually animate and speak the speak words um and you'll actually be able to recognize them from uh from the lip Mo uh MO a thing called conversation learning where um when your creature will learn how to speak and talk like you when you're online with him uh I won't be showing that today but it's incredibly incredibly cool and a world which which uh essentially uh balances himself so in summary black and white is a role playing game where you play the role of a God the world is what you make it you nurture a creature into whatever you want him to be an unspeakable killing machine or wonderfully benevolently kind

creature um you play through a story which has a beginning a middle and an end everything I'm going to show you today um will be just features in the game I'm not going to be able to show you the whole game it'll just be features it may confuse you but please always remember that you are playing through this interactive story and making learning to play the game part of the game itself I just don't think tutorials work it's far better to say to look at what console games do and make the learning part of it part of the game part of the story enabling you to uh you know takes pressure off you the last thing I want to do when I get a game home and unwrap it and put it in the drive is spend 2 hours learning to play it it feels like going to school it's far better if that's part of the story so um the last slide is when it's going to be finished um it'll be released I hope on the 23rd of September this year um there'll be three different

versions black and white Tales which is a single player version black and white Gathering which is the online chat program which I'll talk about a little later and black and white worlds which is the full-blown um online side and uh currently those are the formats it's going to right I've delayed long enough so now it's time for me to show the game and um I'm very very very nervous about showing it I have to say the chances of it lasting to the end of this demo the end of this show is is is well thousands and thousands to one so please remember this is a game that's still under development um a lot of the stuff especially the speech um is still um got to be done all the speech you're going to hear in the game now is done by members of the LIE head team and they don't know how to uh to to talk uh at all it sounds cheesy it sounds horrible but

please forgive them um the two assistant spres you're going to see are still still scratch so let me show you something of the world for a start you'll notice that um it is uh completely free of icons the only thing that in the game is this hand this hand enables you to move around freely we tried to do away with the keyboard completely I can move around with the uh in the world just by clicking and pulling the world around or I can point to places I want to go to and just double click and move back I can go and look at the world in incredible detail um for example this is the and incidentally this is such a cheap trick but everyone always comments on it it took about 2 seconds to do this this uh this uh this little trick that I showed you here I can go and look and look at the world and incredible detail for example um this is uh a barrel with an apple on it and in the Apple you can see a worm

and I can pull back from that and look at the whole world a persistent frame rate um of 25 frames a second you know being inspired by the consoles is is something that I've really tried to do here keep the frame rate system that is it absolutely relies upon that um um and even when uh even when you do look a long way away um it will it will try and maintain that uh that frame range okay so what can you do in this world well let me tell you the first game rule the first game rule is you are a God and as such you can do anything anything you like in the area that believes in you and this red flash that is going across the land you see here denate denotes the area that actually believes in here at the moment so I can uh outside this area I can do

nothing at all I can't pick rocks up I can't do anything inside this area I can do anything so clearly one of the things I might want to do is pick this uh this woman up and um I can just be you know I might need to teach these v a lesson you know I don't want them to be cheeky to me I want them to believe in me and maybe I want to make a world that is really horrible and evil so let's just uh let's just Chuck her around a little bit um so there she is oh she's still alive let's see what happens if I uh pick up this rock and I just uh sort of kind of just Dr this rock on top of her you can do anything you like within the world I can um I can start bowling if I like um you can even um do cool things you can

uh be nice to people you don't have to be nasty I can pick up this woman here and I can take her over to this field this is what I call the micromanagement portion of the game you don't have to do it it's there it's cool if you do do it you'll find your villagers a little bit better but if you want to get on with the game and do something else you can do so I can take this woman and just say to her look I want you to farm this field so let's just gently drop her down um oh that was unfortunate yeah I had only my hand a little bit too long sorry about yes first I shouldn't have been quite so vicious to let's do that again sorry it is cool being nasty don't have to be I play some there for there we go you made it he should he should now um they're all actually mourning you know he is going to they're all little

upset by um by that but they get getting back to work I'll just take that distraction out of the way for them and that'll be absolutely fine so you can do that you can um you can do some cool things maybe your V this Village needs some wood to build some more houses for you so the town becomes bigger there's more of them they'll believe in you more so you can even do things like I can uh pick up trees um and I can Chuck trees around I can uh drop trees down and you'll notice the little villages will actually start interacting with those trees and start start chopping those trees up into the into firewood and enabling um them to build more things so you know it is an amazingly interactable um place you can do cool things like steal their food from one Village and put it into another Village anything you want that is the sand pit idea the the ants nest that I discovered as a kid but where the game really really comes

into its own is when I introduce the creature now um the creature is actually this is a bug I have to tell you about this bug it's quite amusing you can pick up a little person and um put them down near a tree um and she should little person should um should now know that what I mean is for her to go and chop the tree down the unfortunate thing is I forgot to tell her to get out the way of the falling trees so quite often trees can fall on the people who chop them which is a a little detail of a bug that needs to be get over so let's just look at the creature side of it now incidentally you'll notice that it's actually getting the weather is actually changing um I love playing um I love adding things into games one of the cool things about uh black and white is it's a fully fully weather simulation if you have this on install you can actually um

uh black and white every time you play it will go on to the web we'll go on to www WEA cities.com download weather information about the city that you live in and the weather you see in black and white will be the same as the weather outside your window um which is quite cool so let's um let's introduce you to the creature um the idea is um that in the first 15 minutes you discover the these creatures and you have a choice of three creatures you can pick up and care for um there is a lion there is a cow and uh there is an ape and it's up to you which one you pick once you pick one that's your creature you do have an opportunity to change it so let's just show you one of those creatures I'm going to cheat now I haven't got time to play the story and we'll we'll just create an ape and here he is he's a

little baby thing at the moment um I'm actually going to cheat to make him a little bit bigger um he grows up and as he grows up he can get by the end of the game he can get absolutely huge and you can see him comparatively at the comparative distance in scale to him now the creature himself has learns in different ways and as when I what I said is you can teach him anything you like um absolutely anything um anything uh in the world you can teach him I'll just bring him over here um and there is two distinct ways that your creature learns the first way was inspired by me watching watching children and I'm just going to put it on pause a second while I explain this point the cool thing about children or the very uncool thing about children depending on which way you look at it is that children never stop learning just because they turn around to a kid and say look this is a lovely blue pen and

they'll say blue pen blue pen and then and that teaches them a very strong lesson that this is called a blue pen if I then turn back and carry on watching the football game and say come on you bastards score a goal then don't expect your kid to suddenly switch off learning expect and indeed you will experience the fact the next time you go down to the supermarket your kid will rep will actually say come on Daddy you bastard I want to get home and that key thing that key way of learning was um uh an inspiration for black and white your creature watches you play the game and every time you're mean every time you're nasty every time you do anything in the world he is taking that as inspiration that means he is a reflection of the way that you play the game that's the first way he learns but more importantly what he learn maybe more importantly is your ability to say uh that was good that was bad I showed him this object he didn't

do anything with him I'm going to tell him off now you tell him off just by clicking on him holding down the mouse and I'm just going to change it to daylight so you can see what's going on and I'm now interacting with him see he's he's a bit cheeky and he's got to be told off and you tell him off by just by slapping him around a little bit um if you really really want to tell him off then uh you know just really laughing around um and that actually tells him bad you know bad it's like rolling up on newspaper and hitting a dog I mean it's you know it's a bad lesson he's depressed now I me you got to feel sorry for him the other way is just moving the M slowly over him and just stroking and he really really likes being stroked he likes his hair hands being run through his hair he he understands about all his body parts you can stroke his tummy if he's got okay cake you can tickle his feet and for that extra special reward

of course Royal massage is one be particularly enjoy so you know trying to make this real living creature is um you know was a real ambition what I'm going to do now is again because we don't have the side I really want to show off some of the things that creatures can do I'm going to bring up on this what I'm going to show you now is not part of the game at all it just allows me to activate cool features about the creature just to show you some of the things that happen during the game so I'll activate that editor and load in one of another creatures which is a tiger um this creature um as I said it starts off in the game as his tiny little thing um and as the game goes on he grows up until he ends up this huge Mammoth thing now obviously if you've you know made this huge creature and

you've made him a caring kind creature um then uh him go walking through a village is a problem because he'll end up squishing more little people than he will saving them but not only does the creature change in size but he actually morphs he morphs in real time to reflect his state for example if you've encouraged him to eat a lot then he will start putting on weight he'll end up really really fat now you're going to have to what you can do do with your creature a cool thing is while you're playing through the single player game you can take your creature out of the single player game take him online and meet other people's creatures now you're the one that has to justify well your creature is hugely overweight or or perhaps why your creature is completely underfed so your creature changes um changes in size from what he eats but he also changes in size he's not part of the game so that's why he walk through him by the way he changes in size um in terms of size and his strength

your creature will can uh lift things up he can do manual um manual tasks for you he can fight for you the more he fights the more muscles that he actually puts on or any combination of those to so he can be fat and thin fat and strong or or he can be fat and weak any any combination of those two but most importantly as you develop his personality he visually changes now clearly the creature that I'm developing is going to be a hard bastard he's not going to be someone who uh he's not going to be someone you mess with and so you know he's going to he's going to be a little bit evil so he will slowly change a morph to become more evil and vicious looking or if you decided to make him nice and caring he'll change him morph and become more good and uh Godly looking and the sheer number of um the sheer number of things that your creature can do is amazing he has all the facial expressions that um

the human face can possibly make um he can smile he can laugh he can make all the lip the uh all the lip motions all the 44 phon andm motions that human uh voice can make and that enables you to take him online and chat with him and him actually mail the words you're either typing or saying um across a microphone you have to train him up in a variety of things one of the things that you do have to train him up about which I apologize for but British people are just love anything to do with toilets and lavatory humor and one of the things that you can teach him is where and when he can go to the toilet so you can literally and I apologize for this word but I can't think of a better one you can literally train him to all over your opponent and that you can absolutely do that you can also train him to go and uh go to the toilet on fields if he goes to the toilet on fields a lot it'll be used as

fertilizers you can persuade your little people to to pick up the Poo it may make make you feel a little bit nauseous to see this uh to see all this poo moving around the world but they will put it down on the fields and just before the show we had this terrible terrible bug with the AI where basically what was happening the creatures got obsessed with their own their own feces and ended up learning to fight with them by picking them up and throwing them at each other which made me feel ill and I I tell you I am nervous about showing you the fighting in case this bug wasn't fixed because if that happens again it just is you know it'll turn you off the whole product I'm going to have to get rid of uh my creature soon but where the game really really comes into its own is the fighting system what I wanted to do is create a fighting system system that was as comprehensive as any fighting game

you can get on any system ever and enable you to teach and encourage your your creature to fight so if I just uh if I just what I'm going to do is set up a fight I just do one first yes goody two shoes why are we always arguing because I hate you what I'm going to do is um I'm not taking any chances there you set up a fight between two creatures and I'm going to set up a fight between the tiger and surprisingly a cow you may think I know what the outcome of this is going to be the Tiger's going to win well we spent a little time on the cow and uh he's not the Wimpy thing that you might uh you might have thought [Music] of right here they go they're just sort of sizing each other up and uh okay come on

cow um and you you what you'll notice is as they fight we have this very very cool persistent damage uh persistent damage going in on the creatures you can just see down there the the um cow has been hit on the belly and you can just see that a bruise is starting to uh a bruise is starting to develop um bruis is I want you to see this the cow special it's quite it is quite C anyway a bruise is starting to develop where he's been now that damage that is done um done by the lion is persistent in other words it will heal over time and a scar will remain that means that your creatures are completely unique when you are going online and you uh and you see

another creature and he's walking over the hill he looks hunched and mean and vicious you know exactly what the player is behind I just need to change the odds because my T is getting mashed uh mashed up here what I'm going to do is just make the tiger a little bit more evil and also um just make a little bit in the Tiger's favor just a little bit yeah that's better I mean I could have I could have done okay okay we'll change it back again there we go so the creatures are are incredibly cool things there's one more thing

there's one more thing I got to show about the creature but it is nightfall and this cool thing this Moon that's going up here is what the moon will be like outside this Hall tonight um you know trying to make it as real as possible one last thing one last trick with a creature there loads and loads of stuff which I haven't really shown um I'll show a different creature the wolf uh IM Mor in quite cool way um one last thing I didn't share with a creature is some of the individual stuff that he does um he can he's can get happy he can get cold he can get hot if you do decide to take your creature online what we will be doing is introducing um colds and flu to uh the online uh when you're online so if your creature's been uh going around with other creatures he can actually catch a cold uh from those other creatures the other cool thing is that

you will notice that um your Creature if you are playing a CD in the drive you can play any music CD you like while playing black and white or in any MP3 you will notice that after a while your creature will start tapping his foot and you'll further notice that after a little longer he will learn to dance in perfect time to um he'll learn to dance in perfect time to the to the CD you're listening to now um that means what we are actually doing is we're going to www tunes.com downloading information on the music track finding out what the type of music is and so your creature will learn to break dance the if you can imagine what it's like going online with your creature who is just expert at break dancing and showing them off to everyone else it's it's ult ultimately cool um yeah [Music] can have good without evil about the I

say I'll show you a bit more about the cre a little bit later on what I'd like to show you now is something to do with the magic system the idea of the magic system is that you need little people to pray and worship you uh to to enable you to to uh utilize the magic and that's what this thing is here rather strangely they they built it in your honor and what you can do is you can move this up and tell them right it's time that you all came and started worshiping me and they're all start to run towards the Citadel and when they get there they'll start crying now what I'm going to show you now is the inside of the Citadel which is extremely important it allows you to look at certain things within the world and this is showing off some of our new engine technology um which I haven't shown before but um it it's quite

cool this is the inside of the Citadel this is uh our new 3D engine it has realtime Ray tracing and a thing called real materials which if you look at this bronze statue here you can see the light sourcing reflecting of the bronze statue you can see um you can see the the all the reflections on the floor all the lighting effects that are going on um I think it's really cool and it's going to enable us to do some amazing things with with our next game what it what what is inside the Citadel are different rooms there's a room for your creature there's a room for the story and these rooms um these rooms have different uh pictures in you can do an incredibly cool thing with these pictures if it's a story that you've if it's an element a part of the story that you've completed a challenge what you can do is you can go up to one of these pictures and click on the picture and think to yourself I didn't like the way I did

that challenge I really didn't you know I thought it wasn't right you can click on that challenge the game will allow you to do that challenge again and then it will Fast Forward all the effects that the difference that you made in that challenge would have taken it's like going back in time making a little tiny change and then going forward in time again and seeing what that change does I think it's a it enables people to get U to absolutely get things right um you know the Citadel is there designed to be a really beautiful uh really really beautiful beautiful place okay let's have a look at some of the Spells quiet I don't like it I do um the what I'm going to do is ask the my little people here are all chanting away I'm going to ask them to pray for a fireball um and that charges up the now get bad voice over wisely you are using the prayers of your and what I can do with these Fireballs

is I can throw them so I'm going to now throw this across the landscape and you can see that it just it just shoots across the landscape what I've tried to do with this is try and make this as intuitive possible I'm just going to cheat now and give myself free access to the Spells try and make this as intuitive as possible also allow you to get good at casting magic so you can do some cool stuff with it for example I can I can um throw a fireball and just give it a little tiny bit of after touch just like you do in a football game just a little bit of after touch that you can curl it round mountains if we're playing a multiplayer game I can start bombarding your places with Fireballs the other thing that you can do is using the gesture technology I can um I can just paint on the landscape a symbol and this symbol allow Powers up the fireball so if I cast it now you can see that that it actually turns into three Fireballs if I if some of those some of

those gestures can be really um really complex for example I can do a gesture like this which is a pentagram which really Powers up the Fireball and allow bit loud sorry um just allows it to be a really explosive Fireball the other thing is that um these gestures are it's really flexible and must War now if anybody of you plays me at multiplayer one of the gestures in the game is my signature which is the ultimate cheat for me which allows me to cheat um with everybody else the Spells are not only um they are not only um destructive you there are creative spells this is a a storm spell which allows me to create a storm again I just paint down on the landscape uh the area of which I want the storm to cover and if you have a look it'll actually start raining now um you can then push that storm uh push that storm

across the landscape towards somebody else um you know again trying to make things as realistic as you as you possibly can um there are there are spells which allow you to create things uh for example I can click on this maybe my Villages run out area what I'll do is just um create a um Magic Forest and I apologize that the woman hasn't got any clothes on at the moment she should do um she'll she'll go out and create a Magic Forest for you to uh for the little people to chop down the room um there's also uh one second there's also the ability to cast Magic on your creature for example um if

I have a creature I can cast a magic spell on him um I may want to send him out of my territory I may want him to try and persuade other villages to come across to my cause and so one of the spells that is extremely useful for that is the crash spell um sorry about this one one second uh I told you crash it's a miracle has lasted this long let's just quickly go back in yeah you can what you can do is you can cast Magic on your creature but very cooly any of the spells that you've seen me uh cast you can teach your creature any of those spells that means when one creature meets another creature instead of fighting out hand to hand they can actually have this incredibly cool Battle of magic I mean just this immensely cool Battle of uh of magic that's there so um that's very cool and I'll just uh

go forward and just very quickly um create a creature and show you a couple more [Music] things I'm I'm just completely cheating [Music] now find the right spell one second I'll let the creature entertain you while I'm doing this right this is the um this is the invisibility spell if I cast it on my creature then um it pours a potion over the top of him and he'll slowly go invisible and of course while is's asleep which is useful and the only thing that doesn't go invisible are his eyes so you can still see his eyes so if I just uh start slapping him around you

can still see his eyes that's there you can you can turn creatures to Stone um if I just show you my creature actually um casting a spell what I'm going to do is uh that was a [Music] mistake [Music] sorry about that just a little weit um what I'm going to do is I'm going to force my creature to um to cast a spell for example I'll force him to cast The Fireball spell that you just saw um against this bridge here now you notice that he is actually casting doing the same gesture that I actually used earlier and he's going to cast that against poor unsuspecting uh tiger that's there so your creatures there are no limits to

the uh yeah look the smile in his face after that there is absolutely no limits to the uh to the amount that your creature can learn now we're running a little bit out of time at the moment but what I'd like to do is show you some of the story stuff in the game now um now the idea of the story stuff is that you have these two advisors you've seen them pop up occasionally they're like the Hollywood angel and devil on your shoulder there's the Angel that's always trying to get you to do good stuff she's always trying to get you to be nice and kind and there's a devil that just wants you to be mean and cruel and and uh and nasty and as you as you play the game they are listening out for prayers The woman Inside this house is praying to you help PR of of of the little people and you can choose to activate those prayers or not and it's essentially these challenges which enable you to

progress through the uh progress through the story so I'll kick off one of these challenges the speech you're going to hear there is very very cheesy I apologize for it but um gives you an example oh great one I kneel before you my brother tarvis in the fever has left his sick bed and wandered into the forest where he must be lost he is so weak I fear for his life here I please for help I beg you help this woman and her poor brother and you will surely Weep the benefits she has put a faith in you you can't run around after these people they have to live their own lives if you want them to respect you as a god carry out an act of a God kill one of them right well what shall I do how evil or how good shall I be well clearly for this demonstration it seems evil is good so I'll be evil now I could be a little bit evil I could

perhaps just ignore this I could perhaps go to the brother and pick him up and kill him but I could be I could be hugely evil if I liked and the hugely evil answer to this is to pick up the woman to kill her in any way you you see fit basically uh where is she where she going uh pick her up and to uh put her by her dead brother so by her her near close to death brother that means what you're doing is killing the woman that prayed you in the first place killing her off and then dropping her by the uh just do that one more time just there's one little tiny bug with it um The woman Inside this house is praying to you for help right if I just activate

that again so you choose how you solve this challenge do you want to be kind and or do you want to be um evil and my brother Taris in a fever and that is the whole key to the way that the story the story actually unfolds he is so weak I fear for his life here I please for help I beg [Music] you right help this woman and her poor brother send my creature to help me do this as well she has put a faith in you you can't run around after these people they have to live their own lives so if I pick her up now if you want them to respect you as a god carry out an act of a God kill one of them so I'm just going to pick her up and just throw her around a bit that's not too far no that's so there she is so I'll pick her up now and I'll take her that'll teach her to meddle with

nature it's terrible we can't run a religion like this so I'll just take her to um to the forest where her her lost brother is and just drop her down uh next to her next to her [Music] brother my sister dead how can this be oh now that was a pretty evil thing to do equally I could have gone in and I could of course my creatures just seen this and he's realized that you know I've been pretty evil and Vicious he's going to learn something from that from that side of it and for that you get a little reward you get an extra um an extra um spell so that's essentially black and white I could show you I could talk about it all night um uh and I'd love to talk about it all tonight but uh maybe if we have enough time if anybody's got any very quick questions they they want

to ask at the investigate whil I leave the game in um the creatures capable hands does does anyone have any questions my poor children are lost ask nobody a stranger has been seen putting ches yes we got one he has him imprisoned in his secret [Applause] Hideway let's get it looks like a wonderful game Peter thanks for showing it to us I was wondering if you saw the recent remake of populus and if so what you thought of it uh populus the beginning I thought it was a it was a very very beautiful game uh they did a fantastic job I know the person who developed I respect him an awful lot um I still think that uh that

the idea of it populist being a very very simple game was a very compulsive one any other questions actually we're running awfully late maybe we should hold the questions thank you very much indeed [Music] [Applause] um thank you very much [Music] [Music] days stand back