September 22, 2007
The Ass Wants to Be Free
Sandbox games populated by NPCs invite players to screw around. One of our design goals when developing Façade was believability; we put significant effort into supporting and rewarding what we called “crazy guy” behavior from the player.
A few players over at Something Awful desire that kind of gameplay in mainstream games — charmingly describing it as “Asshole Physics”. A manifesto on the topic was recently updated from the original from 2003.
A link to Façade in the article created a big spike in downloads this week… Grace and Trip are surely being thoroughly abused as you read this.
September 23rd, 2007 at 7:40 pm
In Facade, though, we balanced “crazy guy” with story development. I remember several long and fun design discussions about the relationship between interactive storytelling and Crazy Guy, and how, for Facade at least, we were coming down more on the side of storytelling than on fully open-world Crazy Guy (though yes, we support some). And I remember at the time that we both thought a full on Crazy Guy would be pretty fun…