posting about jesse venbrux’s deaths – a seminal game in which players passively affect one another’s games, preceding noby noby boy and demon’s souls – i wrote:
the bodyparts can actually be climbed on, allowing player deaths to actually transform the landscape of the level in a small way. i’d love to see the final game build on this more: what if the bodies of players who’ve died in a particularly difficult area stack to form a shortcut that allow[s] the next players to bypass that area? there could be a real collaborative effort in players throwing themselves at a seemingly impossible task, knowing that their remains will help the next player get that much farther.
a year later, peter groeneweg made we the giants.
17 comments
I can’t seem to click on the “Sacrifice” button. Siiiiiiiigh.
By the time I saw this, the game field was already littered with corpses. The stairs to the stars were already built, and as a special bonus, corpses also obscured the last tutorial-guy’s text for no discernible reason. I’m assuming he’s the guy that tells you how to sacrifice yourself.
My favorite example of a game passively letting you affect others through your deaths is the roguelike, Nethack. When you died, you could leave a “bones file”. This would essentially be the level you died on, frozen at the point you died.
Someone playing a game on the same server then had a chance of running into the scene of your death, enemies that killed you and all items still present. Your corpse’s equipment could greatly help the player that scavenged it. They would just have to survive the original thing that killed you, your vengeful ghost, any pets you left behind, and any effects from your old stuff probably being cursed.
Looks like the author reset the corpses. Now it’s down to like 4.
Yyyyyyyeeeah, sounds like a fun concept, but in practice it was scheisse due to the shortness of the game. Oh well, interesting…
For those who can’t see the text message, you’re told Esc is the suicide button.
My first play, and it appears that the corpses in front of me have been placed so as to make further progress impossible. I can place my own body to help make a stepstool, but it would be easy for someone else to come along and make my stepstool part of the immense wall as well. The only way to play this game is to not play. Griefing via suicide.
yyyyyyyeeeah, this game needs at least ten more levels (it’d be awesome if one of them was a snow world) and a big boss fight at the end.
no, what are you talking about, this game is just about perfect, aside from possibly some lack of foresight on the designer’s part about, you know, gamers.
the problem with this game is that its on the internet and therefore unplayable
Maybe a way to sacrifice your own life to undo another’s work? Could add some interesting interaction.
Conceptually, I can’t fault the game at all, but as a player who started it up only to find the game effectively “beaten” already, I have some problems!
Ways I could see to make this more interesting (not that that needs to be a goal of games or anything):
1) More levels. Maybe have one level randomly selected from a large pool (heck, have a bunch of copies of the same level and randomly select one) so you could sometimes experience the product of others’ sacrifice and sometimes be able to aid the cause for yourself.
2) More “other” things to do. Even, like, being able to push blocks around or adding more platforms or something could allow it to not always be obvious when a level is finishable, making sacrifice a meaningful choice instead of that thing you do when the stack isn’t high enough.
First time commenting, this is probably way too long but I didn’t know where else to put it!
Trouble with the game is that the only decision the player has to make is whether or not he will die in a place that is ideal for the next player. And if one person decides not to, it can end the game completely.
I don’t even know if it’s worth praising the concept seeing as all it does is take this mechanic of “passively affecting other players” (that has been applied, better, multiple times in the past) and merely reduce it to its absolute simplest form. And hilariously, it’s even LESS playable as a result.
http://chaoseed.com/necro/index.php
This game was an entry into TIGS Commonplace Book competition, and follows a similar concept of sacrifice for progression.
This would be a lot more fun if the suicide mechanic worked. I can’t kill myself,no matter how many times I click ’sacrifice’.
OH MY GOD when I read this entry I read “Jesse Venbrux’s death”!!!!
You really, really scared me.
This game should really be renamed “gamers are real jerks”.
Auntie, well, this is as much a game as this (http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=50496) 480-byter I wrote about 30 mins before the party deadline, just because the graphist wanted the pig included in the compo.
Looks like the game has been restarted or something. The stairway isn’t finished yet. The dying advice from the giants is pretty disappointing. I get better stuff off of people’s facebook walls.
I encountered a bug in this game and used it to build an inverted pyramid in the sky: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v229/sergiocornaga/wethegiantspyramid2.png
Now everyone should be able to reach the star.
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