Don't you miss playing God?

[All roles filled!]

I'm giving serious consideration to making my next project a spiritual successor to Black & White.

You can't even buy it anymore.
You can get the disks and run a VM of windows XP but who's gonna go through all that?

Last I was able to play a legit copy it crashed after trying to load through the first Edin portal.
In the last abandonware copy I played, the creature didn't grow throughout the whole campaign and the ending broke the game.

So, I can't scratch that itch, ya know?

Does this kind of game interest you?

What would you add or change about the source material if it were your game?

I was talking with my mom and she was so sure that you could click and hold a tree from a forest to pull a stream of wood out of the forest, that's not a feature but maybe it should be, maybe you should also be able to move amounts of water that grow the longer you hold the right-click button, maybe you should be able to suck steams of villagers into a big twitching mass in your floating hand to toss as a unit or mass assign to a task.

I'm primarily an artist and I am looking for someone or someones to help me create this project, I have no shipped titles but I'm plucky and I've got spunk.

To be clear this is not a paid offer, I won't hire you, your freelance studio, your design company, your marketing firm, nor your consultancy agency.

I'm working on this for free and I have a lot of needs to see this game completed, if you are able and willing to fill that need and this game makes money, which it might not, then I would be happy to discuss how we share that money before any work begins.

If you want to know more about the development aspect and more about what I offer to a team then read on, otherwise:

TLDR;

So, who am I to be talking about remaking 20-year-old cult classics?

I mean Lionhead, the original designers, and EA don't see the value in rebooting the franchise, so I, some rando on the internet suddenly think I have what it takes to pull this off?

Well, hi, I'm Robin, I bet those devs have all moved on with their lives, some to MUCH bigger things.

Lionhead got bought by Microsoft and sure Microsoft *could* task a new group to make a spiritual successor, but they would need a pretty huge financial incentive to do so, there's no reason to believe a modern audience is chomping at the bit for the resurgence of a game that didn't merit a 3'rd followup from almost 20 years ago.

The same goes for EA, They're the ones who own the title.

Anyways, you'd need a team with skill but also a passion for the source material, I have those.

That game Fata Deum looks cool, but I want to cut both closer to the source material than they are, but also bring the graphics/aesthetic/appeal into the current year more effectively than they have. I would love to focus much more on the creature training and the kind of Tamagotchi aspect of the sim.

We can do it without crowdfunding.

As for me, I'm pretty good with unity, I've got 4 years of art school, illustration, 3D, animation.
I've bought all of the professional art software I need, just some examples are Zbrush, Substance Painter, Marvelous Designer, but also many more.

I think I can rapidly prototype out a clone of the first world pretty quickly and get it to a testable state on my own without much issue. I would be relying HEAVILY on asset systems for that, I detail them a bit more below, but suffice to say I picked from my list of paid assets over 150 that I thought might be tangentially helpful to this project, but none of them are art. Lots of VFX and post-processing stuff, but for the art, I want to create primarily all of it. I have a DSLR and the right lenses and filters for capturing textures, and substance designer for creating them procedurally.

I'm up to the challenge of creating some village assets, a couple of different cultures, figuring out the terrain generation, texture parameters, vegetation rules, and upgraded shaders.

The real time and skill-consuming parts for me will be the pets you can choose from.
Rigging them animating them and getting them to behave the way one would expect of a God sim.

I bought a bunch of assets that I think will help with crafting the game, these include:

Herding and flocking for animals, procedural terrain with biome support, advanced terrain shaders, a gesture recognition system, quest system, post-processing, camera effects, high-quality VFX, a destruction engine, tree generator, vegetation engine, volumetric everything including reactive grass, a full RTS Engine which is like an Age of Empires clone asset complete with building placement / unit production / upgrades / gathering, skin and hair shaders, vegetation shaders, better shadows, behavior trees, formation packs, sensory tools, tons of SFX and SFX scene integration tools, HDRP light enhancements, runtime lightmap previewing and baking, skinned mesh instancing, UI and menu system enhancements, many optimization tools, pathfinding, cloth/liquid/rope physics, water, rivers, weather, spell effects, and so many more.

I've already spent a great deal of time messing around with many of these tools but I'm willing to learn to integrate all of the assets that will play nicely and work with each other well enough.

I'm sure there will be some custom code needed just to make the assets I have work the way I need them to.

I even bought a digital piano, a midi controller with a beat pad, and a daw with a synthetic instrument library of over 100 instruments. I've never composed before and this game needs amazing music to work, so either I need to work on this game in the background for a long while so I can build my composition chops, otherwise, I need to bring a composer in.

Ideally, I would love to just be able to worry about completing the art and integrating the assets I've mentioned above, but if you're recalling Black & White correctly, you'll remember that it's a very complex game mechanically speaking. We can do a lot and I do mean a LOT of heavy lifting with the assets I already own and I'm willing to get a few more if they're needed, but the systems and mechanics we need are vast and unwieldy.

That creature needs to age, learn, get strong, get fat, stamp tattoos, interact, follow commands, learn spells, have preferences, fight in a ring.

The miracles are no easy feat.

Getting the controls perfect will be difficult.

Getting the temple worked out and functional and beautiful will be a fun challenge.

There's so much more that makes this hard.

If you're reading this and you loved B&W, reach out or offer advice.

I think a Programmer and a Composer could really help me set this over the top. I don't mind getting on Patreon and splitting the income. I don't imagine it'll be more than a cup of Starbucks each month for each of us, if anything at all.

Honorable mentions for team roles would be UI/UX designer, Community Manager, Writing Editor, Marketing Coordinator.

Thanks for reading, I've been Robin!
Here's my most updated portfolio, this content is about 5 years old, I can share newer stuff with you or perform an art test before you sign on:
Robinhoole.weebly.com

Here's a Discord Server for development conversation and for people to watch Development or want to get ahold of me externally:

https://discord.gg/yBrK9C48

 

Black and White? I haven't heard about that game in a long time.

My suggestion is, to make your own version of Black and White and call it by a different name, since the original franchise is owned by the companies you mentioned above. That way you would avoid getting a cease and desist order thingy from them. But you obviously know that already.

Exactly.

The good thing is, at least you are realistic as to how hard this will be. Programming complex stuff like that, and worse, the AI for a game like that for free, will be kinda tough, is doable and possible, but will not be an easy feat, especially for a game like that. But I admire your will, to make an epic game like that.