Ecosystem Games

tonymagro — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 22:00:28 +0000

I once tried to create a game called Hunt Fish Camp. The main goal of the game was to hunt various types of wildlife. The cool thing about this game was that it revolved around an A.I. ecosystem. The idea was that you would drop a bunch of different animals into a level and they would interact with each other. I had a basic ecosystem going in the Half-Life 2 engine with birds, bears, headcrabs, and some other creatures. The animals had basic needs like hunger, sleep, and procreation. The game was really cool because the world just took care of itself. You would spawn into a level and walk around seeing all these cool interactions between species. It was really cool but it had one major flaw. There was no game. It was a cool software project and really neat to look at but not really all that fun to play. I couldn’t figure out why and chalked it up to the game’s young development state and unpolished gameplay.

Recently, I have begun to crave this sort of ecosystem type game again. A long time ago I heard about a game called S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl by developer GSC Game World. It has been in development for a long time. The interesting thing about this game is that it’s ecosystem based. From what I understood or possibly imagined is that it contains an A.I. ecosystem of mutants and humans which live in a zone. The basic idea behind the game was to give the player a huge environment and have them achieve goals with the main goal being to find and trade artifacts. The player tries to accomplish these goals and most of the gameplay comes from them interacting with the various creatures in the ecosystem. This sounded like the game I always wanted to play. I read an interesting interview with Anton Bolshakov, one of the developers on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. In the interview it sounded like the developers of S.T.A.L.K.E.R ran into the same problem I did when creating Hunt Fish Camp. It was an awesome simulation but it just didn’t appeal to players in terms of gameplay. As a result they delayed the game and began working on a more structured story. In another interview Bolshakov gave an explanation of why they chose to do this:

“Initially, the idea of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was a complete simulation with no plot, when any of the stalker-characters could finish the game. Unfortunately, it was not possible to implement this idea, since players did not understand why after they have been playing the game for three weeks they suddenly saw the “Game Over” screen, when some other stalker passed the game. The main concept became plot-oriented. The game gained a storyline that the player can go along from the first mission and until the end. But this storyline got a simulated world. You can go along with the story or go sideways. You can explore the world, do sidequests.”

It appears that S.T.A.L.K.E.R has now become an ecosystem based game with a storyline. It will be interesting to see since a lot of development went into the ecosystem’s simulation. Most games create the A.I. to facilitate the type of game and storyline they are creating as apposed to S.T.A.L.K.E.R where they kind of created a story over their A.I. system. I think it is going to be a really cool game but at the very least it should be very interesting to see how the gameplay works.

random – Tony's Blog

Ecosystem Games