magog-on-the-march:

I tried to do the next best thing [instead of showing gameplay], which is show you the problems that we started to have to solve based on followers, and followers is what Abe’s really about if we go to who Abe is as a game: it’s really about followers and thinking puzzles.

If you were to deduce ‘what is Abe’, you go ‘it’s kind of smart puzzles that you have to solve, but you solve them through action, and it’s all about rescuing guys’, but what we want to do is ‘the more followers you have, the more power you have, the more spiritual power you have’.

First Picture: So, what I’m going to show you here is just the UI, and the game screen behind it is black. But the UI will hint at more of what we had to deal with, and managing all this, and so here I’m gonna start to play and what you’ll see is down on the bottom we have a system that has Abe’s health, his inventory, his Chi status, and as he collects followers, these followers are becoming much more difficult to manage, and the reason is that in the previous games, even New N Tasty, the Mudokons couldn’t even jump over a gap, let alone hoist up or follow you through adverse conditions. So they were very limited capacity beasts of burden, and while they helped your high score, they didn’t help you like allies that could fight for you that could be used like tower defense and placed in different places and do things and be set to different aggressive modes: the way you can arm them and where you can manage a lot of them, and all this is happening now in Soulstorm. 

What that meant was it becomes a more dynamic environment, where sometimes your Mudokons are not all on screen because you’ve put them to work doing other things, so how do you manage that? How do we manage that on a VU level? So, this is where we had to create the icon system of the Muds following you, so this is as you ‘hello’, and ‘all of you’, and you start gathering larger groups of them. Two things are happening: the accumulation of the meter, you can tell how many are following you, you can tell if they’re being put to work or being damaged or whatever, but as you crease(?) more followers, you see that glow? That’s your Chi, so your spiritual power is increasing, which means the things you can buy with that currency are opening up and increasing, and now you can start to tell even if they’re immediately in your vicinity or not; if they’re taking damage they’re flashing red, they turn red if they get killed. So as they’re flashing, it’s basically giving you more ways to monitor what’s happening with these guys that are much more dynamic and much more than just beasts of burden, but becoming active allies on the screen with you at the same time in mass quantity.

Second Picture: Now, as that’s happening in a world of flammable brew (if you saw the early releases we did on Soulstorm, we said we’re gonna get more dynamic, we’re gonna get more highly volatile, it’s gonna be slightly darker, and it’s gonna be a lot more intense), so let’s just say one of the side effects of brew is that it’s highly flammable, and everyone’s addicted to it, so the combination makes for some extremely dangerous gameplay that starts unfolding. Which means in the world of Abe, he now has to have a much more robust inventory, which in the past he didn’t have, but we needed a much more complex system if we’re dealing with this guy who catches fire because I used brew, but I don’t want him to die. How do I put him out? That led to needing to have many more pickup items. So, in that landscape that meant we needed a lot more abilities to manage, and that meant we had to create an inventory system and now Abe has a robust inventory system that is largely like consumer products that he can get, and those consumer products he can start converting into weapons.

Third Picture: He can then start finding collectibles, crafting those weapons into more specialized things, so inventory system and crafting has become a key part of what Abe does to get all these Mudokons through the world safely, hopefully. In this game, you’re trying not to, ideally, kill the sligs either, so a perfect play, nobody dies. That’s hard as hell, you know, there’s a lot of PTSD trauma that’s going to take place before you achieve that goal, but that’s our goal, that in the ideal world it would have been able to traverse this very different, dangerous landscape and do that without killing anybody, not even sligs.

First Picture: Now, where this game picks up is where New N tasty left off, and we’re left with 301 freed Mudokons. So, this game begins with 301 freed Mudokons that you’re going to try and take with you through the journey, because they don’t just disappear into the ether; they’re gonna stay with you and at times, in real time in play, you’ll be managing the survival of this many guys on screen at one time.

Now, unfortunately I’m not showing game screens, I’m not showing gameplay, but I just gave a big indication of how this is a very different game, but it builds on what we believe was at the heart of what made Abe special, and it reignites our part 2 of 5 in the Quintology.

– Lorne Lanning, EGX 2017

Worth keeping in mind that this UI is almost certainly not finalized.