Hi all, I'm Mark, a solo game dev based in Dublin. Black & White was one of my favourites as a kid, and having jumped through the hoops to play it again on modern hardware it still feels like nothing has filled the gap since. So I started making the game I wanted. It's called Godyssey.
For anyone not familiar with Black & White it's a god game where your power and influence come from people's belief in you. As they witness you perform acts they believe in you more and you become more powerful. There's a big focus on moral alignment of the gods in the game, there's good acts like providing for the people and evil acts like burning the place to the ground. One of the biggest draws is a creature who can learn to do everything you can do just by watching you, and who you can praise or scold to shape the type of being they become. There's also a big comedy factor mostly driven by your 2 advisors, an angel and a devil on your shoulders that are always squabbling.
For the Black & White heads, here's the approach I took - I wrote down two lists: what I'd keep and what I'd change.
Things to keep
- The creature - A blank slate you can mould into whatever you want. They can learn to do everything you can, you praise and punish them to adjust their behaviour.
- The advisors - A good one and a bad one, both voiced, bickering from minute one.
- A sense of humour - The original was funny, both systemically, from your creature and the world, and in the scripted moments with the advisors and the characters you meet.
- Alignment - Good and bad choices, with your hand morphing to match. The land takes on the character of whoever rules it: the grass, the sky, the sea, the villagers and the buildings. The creature has its own alignment, which changes its appearance.
- Systems-driven - Things happen because of rules rather than scripts. Villagers have their routines. A strong wind can blow away anything not tied down. Fire will melt something frozen, but it also spreads, so thawing something out without burning down the whole village is a puzzle in itself.
Things to change
- No micromanaging - Villages can look after themselves. It's up to you to mould them in your image, not to make sure they get three square meals.
- Avoiding the repetition - More ways to generate belief, more secrets to find, more puzzles to solve, and different paths to converting villages.
- Big set pieces - A kraken bending the land in two, a giant sinkhole where there used to be a village, a lighthouse that burns everything its light touches, and an out-of-control windmill that blows everyone away.
- More varied miracles - 30 so far. There are the simple classics like fireball and food, but I've added others that add layers to the gameplay: possess a villager, slow down time, make husks from corpses.
- Rival gods that are more like the player - Starting with them also being represented as a hand. They have to follow the exact same rules as you.
- Modern controls - An optional hotbar for spells and WASD for movement, but you can turn them off and use gestures and land grab if you want the old-school feel.
What I still want to add
The core is there, it's mostly about polish and content now.
Visual overhaul - The art style needs more cohesiveness and the terrain looks bare.
More creature designs, I love my monkey guy but that's diminished if every god has one.
Morphing of buildings and villagers with alignment.
Creature-to-creature interactions.
Any and all feedback is welcome, be brutal :D
There’ll be a playable demo for Steam Next Fest in February. Here’s the Steam page with the full trailer if you want to see more: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5433410/Godyssey/