If you want to give a stationary rock the ability to walk and set its “Ally” setting to yourself so you have a literal pet rock following you around, you can do that. If you want to strip some of the mean little dog-like enemies of all their powers so they wander around aimlessly, you can. The number of possible combinations allows for a lot of creativity. You’re given the ability to recode the attributes of any object or enemy in the game, changing the names, movement, attacks, AI, and elemental weaknesses/affinities. But even then, not as impressive as the game’s bread-and-butter mechanic: the developer tools. Despite a long initial load time, the fact that you can transition between three distinct aesthetics without so much as a stutter is truly impressive. With the in-game creators calling the state of the unfinished build a disaster, the irony here is that it takes serious ambition and programming chops to render a game world like The Magic Circle, which has to come across as broken, lazy, and unfinished, but still functional enough to suit a playable fourth-wall breaking experiment. Your task is to explore the unfinished game world in hopes of finding a way to lock the actual developers out of the game and craft something playable out of the mess. One of the team's older testers, however, has decided to take action, and since you’re the only player with boots on the virtual ground, he grants you access to a few developer tools. Their game is barely functional: the planned painterly landscape is still rendered mostly in black-and-white creatures and objects lack proper behavorial programming and the persistant remnants of a previous, cancelled build from the 32-bit era remain in place. A playable demo is set to appear at a thinly-veiled version of E3 in mere days, and the creators are trying to push out something that will keep everybody happy, to virtually no avail. In the middle of it all is you, a lowly tester, forced to play a constantly changing rudimentary build, all while watching the creators float around the landscape, squabbling over the game’s minutiae. The game’s original creator wants to go ambitious and artsy the game’s creative director just wants to push out a game that will actually sell in the current landscape a scheming, passionate intern with the support of the series' fanbase wants to put out a game that’s basically the original series, repackaged, and will do whatever it takes to see that happen. It’s finally beginning to take shape as a triple-A, first-person, Skyrim-like RPG, but the creative direction of the game is being split three ways. The titular Magic Circle, in-game, is an old-school series of text adventures whose reboot has been mired in development hell for years. It’s the product of AAA veterans, evidenced by some impressive technical wizardry, but also by the tone and timbre of its commentary, which pointedly deconstructs the egos of business types that tend to rip creativity up by the roots during big-budget game development. The Magic Circle, on the other hand, aims big. Most games in that niche tend to aim small, often taking up the perspective of underdogs struggling to make tiny personal games in an industry filled with multimillion-dollar productions. The Magic Circle is another entry in the burgeoning but fascinating subgenre of games about the process of making games.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |