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Months ago I watched this really short, but cool demo of a Hothead game called Swarm. The footage is actually over a year old, and it revolved a really fresh idea. In the first demo, the lemming like creatures would mimic and learn from the player's actions. It reminded me of Pikmin, but with minions that acted on learned behavior. Here is the demo:
Today I watched a demonstration of the current version of the game. Watch the gameplay below:
As you can see it's a very different game. Now the player controls the entire swarm at once. The blue creatures still learn, but the entire swarm moves together. This is quite a bit different from the original vision, and honestly, a bit less interesting. I asked the producer about this change, and his explanation was pretty funny. The problem with the original build was tied to difficulty. After enough learned behavior, the swarm would do everything themselves and would often leave the player with nothing to do. They claimed the game became too boring. This new way of controlling the swarm is supposed to me more involved and therefore more exciting. Either way, the game still looks pretty fun.
Comments
14 years, 8 months ago
Looks really cool and fun, would have loved to mess around with the original idea but still very much looking forward to see how this turns out.
14 years, 8 months ago
Loved pikmin. Doesnt look as interesting as pimin but maybe i will give this a try. What systems will it be on?
14 years, 8 months ago
Wouldn't the reasonable solution be adding new obstacles or having them forget things over time?
14 years, 8 months ago
@J52
I am sure that they spent days, or maybe months to solve this problem. They probably already thought of those things already but they somehow didn't work.
14 years, 8 months ago
>"really fresh idea"
>"Reminded me of pikmin"
lol wtf
14 years, 8 months ago
I dont know if anyone else saw this, but over on 1up they have a gameplay presentation of the same demo and at the very end you can see Nick standing there watching the demo. Just thought people might like to know.
http://gamevideos.1up.com/video/id/31283
14 years, 8 months ago
Even though the new version of them game seems like fun, its still does bother me why they didn't elaborate more on the learning system. Their answer that it got simply boring seems a bit odd. There are tons of other possibilities to stretch that concept. You can have the creatures forget, like mentioned by J52, or maybe fronting problems that the knowledge they gained would work against their progression. Maybe even head towards more strategic area, but in a organic way, of having some creatures prefer curtain actions, or get better at them. I don't know, i haven't played many games in this sort of genre, so things i mentioned have been done before? Any other ideas?
14 years, 8 months ago
I'm getting a lot of different game mixs in this, from Pikmin(obviously), to Overlord, a little bit of Spore, and I'm also kinda seeing some World of Goo. Time to add another game on the my list to watch, lol I've never even heard of it till now, Thanks Brad
14 years, 8 months ago
Never heard about this game but it looked interesting especially their first idea they had. It's sad they change it but nevertheless I'm still intrigued about it. Thank Brad for enlightening me about this game.
14 years, 8 months ago
lol, "why did you change the game?"
"the swarm became sentient and tried to destroy the system from the inside. Some began experiencing self awareness and it became a suicidal blood bath...."
"0_0"
"-_- yup"
14 years, 8 months ago
looks really cool. it remind me of world of goo in a way.
14 years, 6 months ago
I like what they've done. It looks pretty cool now.