CCSF: Day #5 - Grandroids

With the CCSF underway I've been spending quite a bit of time in the CC chat room (use the link above to get there) and it has come to my attention that there's still people who are unaware of Grandroids!
Naturally this will not do at all, so I thought, what with the festival being on and a whole heap of Creatures fan who would otherwise not bother, now would be a good time to give a solid rundown and hopefully suck a few more fans in while the game is under development.

So, we'll start with some history.

Steve Grand is the brain behind the original Creatures game. Although there was a dedicated team of artists and coders, Steve is predominantly (completely?) responsible for the biological functioning of the Norns and Grendels. It was his vision and as Creatures fan we owe a whole lot of thanks to this individual man.

As I understand it, Steve still had a bit to do with the later releases of Creatures 2, Creatures 3 and Docking Station, but by then the product had been bought out and he progressively had less and less to do with the games. Eventually he left the team with unfortunately very little rights to the work that he had originally started.

About 15 years later he's back again and, without the rights to the original code, is starting the same concept from scratch!

Hopefully most of you have heard that Creatures 4 is due for release some time next year, which is definitely exciting. But for me the real excitement is Steve's new game, Grandroids. The reason being, Steve is quite possibly the only person on the planet who has the known-how to create digital animals like our beloved Norns. I'm sure Creatures 4 will be great, but it's unlikely the creatures themselves with have much improvement from Creatures 1. Grandroids on the other hand, has the hopes of creating digital animals that have the capacity to imagine, giving them the ability to predict and plan for future events, as well as massively advanced biological systems.

At present the Grandroids website is locked down and those of us that have access to it have been asked to keep our outside conversations to a minimum. I hope I'm not breaking that trust too much, but I'd really like to give people a small run down on what's been happening within the website and give a small progress update on where the game is at present and what people might expect come release time.

A small glance at the new world of Grandroids? Perhaps, but Steve is still focussed on the new creature rather than the world.

Here is where you can find the original kickstarter project that features a video from Steve explaining what he intends to create with Grandroids.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&term=grandroids

Here is the Grandroids home page, although access is extremely limited right now.
http://www.grandroids.com/

And finally, here is Steve's personal blog. Although not directly related to Grandroids, there are a few articles in there that hint at what we might expect in the game.
http://stevegrand.wordpress.com/