Indie oddball Joason Rohrer is making a new game to be released in April of this year, its just become available to preorder. So far it appears to be a two player storytelling freeform ‘game’ with one player as the ‘game master’/storyteller and the other as the player. Its a lot like a 2D, fast iteration and indie flavoured version of Neverwinter Nights.
The game also follows recent trends in user generated content and uses a Little Big Planet style system of object swapping to build up the available pallette of objects in the game, though you can of course create your own too.
Sounds interesting, but I’m highly doubtful that the second player is going to give me an experience I’m going to enjoy. Maybe if I had a friend who sat around writing stories for this thing all day, but just randomly connecting to another person and trying to play seems like it’ll be hopeless. All you’re going to see are giant dongs chasing you and characters screaming obscenities, etc.
Once, in a prior workplace, a coworker and I had two simultaneous e-mail threads going simulating text adventures — each of us was “DM” in one and player in the other. We were a really good combo each way.
I wouldn’t want to play this game in a less good combo. I’ve already e-mailed her the slide show. :)
I did that a lot with friends in middle school. We called them “verbal text adventures” instead of “role-playing games”, because RPGs have to have dice and statistics, right?
I hadn’t seen this before, but Manveer Heir Tweeted about it today. It looks awesome. I preordered it to play with my brother. He’s very into running pen and paper games, so I’m hoping he’ll be into this.
I’m not sure I get what the advantage is in using weak graphics rather than just text? Roleplaying MUSHes, and old BBS forum roleplaying for that matter, did this kind of thing but in words. And I remember some players being able to write up some very vivid descriptions of places and things. In fact, graphics really limit how you can tell an interactive story and aside from their utility in creating an actual game context they tend to undermine the experience.
There’s no game at all in Sleep is Death so what’s the point? Once again, I get the feeling I’m missing something.
Well Brian, you could say the same thing about Neverwinter Nights and it’s DM system - you COULD just use text, dice, and pencils.
According to Kotaku’s preview, the low-res graphics are supposed to make it super easy for the storyteller to create custom graphics for the story (i.e. a person holding a knife, a person with lamp in hand). Further, the experience is to be something like a visual RPG, create your own adventure game, type of thing.
I am pre-ordered and got my friend in. I can’t wait to make Lovecraftian tales!
I see that the game has people connect to each other by entering the IP address of the GM. With most people behind routers, how is that going to work? I apologize if this is a really stupid question.
