![]() ![]() Croteam no longer had a boring beginning. It took several days, and nothing short of a replacing of the game's original plan, but it was worth it. It required them to rework the Sigil system that unlocks progress. In response, they removed puzzles and shortened the game's version of Rome. For example, the game was boring because it took too long to get from the first to second area. Then came a limited, external, closed beta with local testers and the community, where they discovered even more. ![]() Croteam changed The Talos Principle that based on what they learned from the select few who were invited in. That godlike character plays a very important part of the game, particularly at the beginning, and it grew out of their desire to teach the game to the people they invited to play it. They introduced Gates of Eternity, and the idea of adaptive narrative guidance. Next, they got an alpha version of the full game working, with a barebones structure and even some narrative hooks. Just as the developers could hop from puzzle to puzzle, so could players of The Talos Principle. That process informed the game's eventual non-linear design. In this early stage, designers tested each other's puzzles and fixed the problems they found. The idea at this stage was to create the structure, not to make the game look pretty, and learn what they could. At this point, the game was visually homogenous - a lot of its features looked the same. Now that they were creating a completely new game, they had to figure out what was next. They knew they'd realize what they were doing was wrong, and need major changes. Why? Reactive development is not based on a plan. They didn't know know what they wanted until they saw it. Yet they knew what the end product would look like (a truth particularly acute for a new intellectual property).Īnd they also knew that, several times during the project, they would realize what they were doing was completely wrong. Croteam created a game mechanism and had the foresight to understand that it inspired a game different from one they set out to make. The "philosophical first-person puzzle game," as Hunski describes it, is a product of what Ladavac calls "reactive" game development. ![]() "We started working on Serious Sam 4 and ended up making The Talos Principle," Hunski said. While doing so, they discovered that the mechanic was so fun that it could be its own thing. To test it, they created a series of levels for the internal team to playtest. ![]() When working on Serious Sam 4, they created the Jammer, a portable device that can disable objects like forcefields, weapons and enemies. It began, Hunski said, with a mechanic from another game. They also couldn't exist without Serious Sam. Second, it's built on a foundation of philosophy - and deeply so. The Talos Principle is precisely nothing like Croteam's previous games. The Zagreb, Croatia-based studio is best known for the Serious Sam series of shooters, which it has been creating for decades. That's the story that CTO Aren Ladavac and CCO Davor Hunski told today at a GDC 2015, at a presentation that kicked off the Independent Games Summit. That it exists is a testament to developer Croteam's refusal to ignore a game that wanted to be made and devise a new, iterative way of developing. The Talos Principle was never supposed to happen. ![]()
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