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Weird Worlds is
basically the space game we always wanted to make ever since we first
began playing games with computers. Like many of you who are reading this,
we grew up watching space adventure movies and shows on TV, reading as
much science fiction as we could get our grubby little hands on and, of
course, playing lots of science fiction paper games, so by the time we all
met, we had a pretty good idea of we wanted to do.
In 2002 we
unleashed Strange Adventures in Infinite Space on unsuspecting gamers. It
was the distillation of our saved up ideas, most of them anyway but I'll
get to that, with features here and there, differences from other space
adventure games, that we've always wanted to implement in a game. The main
idea at the time was to make a very quick-playing game that still felt
sort of like watching a couple of seasons of your favorite space adventure
series (except that you'd actually fight the space battles). No mean feat
but there was a precedent that was inspiring; John Butterfield's single
player microgame, Voyage of the BSM Pandora (1981), so we knew it could be
done.
We also wanted the
game to be easy to play, that was (and is) very important to us, and we
wanted to eliminate numbers and all of the charts and stat sheets usually
found in these sorts of games. All of the game system functions such
numbers represent would exist under the hood but only be discoverable by
careful visual and aural observation, intuition, trial and error and
repeated play. The beauty part is that replayability is what Weird Worlds
and Strange Adventures are all about.
Now, Weird Worlds
is the continuation of a certain way of looking at space adventure games.
It is also much closer to the game we originally wanted to make. There are
many features in Weird Worlds that we intended to implement the first time
around but later dropped because of various limitations we were dealing
with at the time. There are also features and goodies we've thought of
since then that begged to be added, and important upgrades to include like
Open GL graphics and better sound, so we had no choice. We had to go ahead
and make it!
One of the things
we are most excited about is Weird Worlds' extendibility. Strange
Adventures modders have done some amazing things with the original game
(which is extendable too but not so completely), so Iikka has made sure
that modders will be able to customize the game. This really opens things
up, and we're hoping to see all kinds of add-ons and alternate games
happening with it, even games based on other settings and genres!
Weird Worlds has
been a blast to make. We hope that comes through because the bottom line
is that we want gamers to have a blast playing it! You know, we don't do
trendy. We don't do generic. We're trying for something kind of unique,
and Weird Worlds is the latest and best version of this experiment,
because we think that's what gamers want too!
Rich
Carlson
Designer: Weird
Worlds: Return to Infinite Space
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