The Header:
What is Darwinia?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwinia_(video_game)
What is Darwinia Plus?
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/d/darwiniaxbla/
Date and Price
http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/62078
Interview
Part 1
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=232199
Part 2
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=232212
Screenshots
Video
Youtube
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Darwinia++&search_type=&aq=f
Gametrailers
http://www.gametrailers.com/game/darwinia/12549
Previews
IGN XBLA
http://xboxlive.ign.com/articles/103/1030663p1.html
CVG
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=189684
UStream Video Preview
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/darwinia-gameplay-preview
OXM UK
http://www.oxm.co.uk/article.php?id=14747
Achievements
http://www.xbox360achievements.org/game/darwinia/achievements/
Reviews: Pending
What is Darwinia?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwinia_(video_game)
Darwinia was created as a digital theme world for artificially intelligent polygons by Dr. Sepulveda. Housed in a massive network of surplus Protologic 68000 machines from the 1980s, Darwinia is a world where the single-poly Darwinians, with their simple, but growing AI, can grow and evolve. Darwinia is also where the world can visit to see them frolicking in their natural, fractal habitat. Darwinians live a life, working and growing, until eventual death, which releases their digital soul to be reincarnated.
However, the player arrives in the midst of an emergency. Darwinia has been infected by a virus, and Dr. Sepulveda is near panic watching decades of research being corrupted and consumed. Sepulveda enlists the player to aid him in rescuing the Darwinians and drive off the virus. The player is given access to the combat programs, simple tools that originally began as mini-games, but now are the only means of attack against the virus. As the player progresses, it soon becomes clear this is not enough, and that triggers the third aspect of the gameplay - evolution.
The first two levels act as an introduction and allow the player to familiarize himself with the controls. After that, Dr. Sepulveda begins assigning tasks that span several levels to achieve a long-term objective. The first task involves clearing the virus population from and reactivating the Mines and Power Generator to provide resources for the Construction Yard. Once done, the Yard begins producing armored units, allowing the player to move on. The next task involves the reincarnation of Darwinians: the Soul Repository in the center of Darwinia collects the floating souls, and sends them down to the Receiver, where the Darwinians collect them and send them to the Pattern Buffer to be reprogrammed with the main Darwinian blueprint code, where they are sent to the Biosphere to be reborn. The player must clear the Viruses from and reactivate all of these facilities.
In the final level of the game, Dr. Sepulveda traces the Viral infection back to its source: E-mail spam. The Darwinians had managed to access Sepulveda's computer, downloading several files and eventually, the Spam. The E-mails were infected with a very nasty strain of internet virus which corrupted the Darwinians. The player is tasked to destroying the few remaining emails.
Darwinia does not fall into any one game genre, as it mixes elements from strategy, action, puzzle, hacker, and God games alike. The player has the ability to run several programs through the Task Manager (a reference to the Windows Task Manager), similar to units used in many real time strategy games. Research allows the player to upgrade programs and weapons, which is critical as the enemy develops. Mission Objectives are given at each location/level, as the player and the Darwinians attempt to wipe out the Viruses in a Great War.
What is Darwinia Plus?
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/d/darwiniaxbla/
Over thousands of generations the peaceful Darwinians have been evolving in a beautiful digital world, but now their whole way of life is under threat from a devastating computer virus that has infected their world and decimated their numbers. Without your protection they don't stand a chance, and its up to you to lead them into battle to recapture their lost world in Darwinia+! Once you've proven your command ability, take your Darwinian army online and challenge your friends to strategic combat, as tribes of Darwinians slaughter one another in a desperate struggle for supremacy.
* Single-player and multiplayer: Play the single-player story driven campaign over 10 beautiful locations, or try multiplayer featuring five action packed game modes and over 49 unique maps.
* Great gameplay: Relive the halycon days of gaming when gameplay triumphed, with the game's unique combination of fast-paced action and strategic battle planning.
* Intense graphics: Spectacular attention-grabbing graphics engage you with their iconic retro-arcade look-and-feel.
* Unique background story: Enter the beautiful virtual world of Darwinia and save the Darwinians from an evil computer virus, or challenge your friends online where tribes of Darwinians fight in a bitter civil war.
* Awards: Darwinia+ is the winner of three awards including the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at the prestigious Independent Games Festival.
Date and Price
http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/62078
800 Microsoft Point ($10) scrambled word puzzler KrissX will be added to the Xbox 360's downloadable Xbox Live Arcade lineup this Wednesday, January 27, Microsoft's Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb has declared, with indie studio Introversion passing along word that the long-coming port of its strategy title Darwinia is due February 10.
Dubbed Darwinia+, the release bundles both 2005's Darwinia and 2008's Multiwinia in a prettied-up 1200 MS Point ($15) package, and marks the studio's first console release.
"We have come to think of Darwinia+ as the Director's Cut as it has surpassed our expectations of what we were originally looking to create and now looks and feels smoother than ever," stated Introversion in today's announcement. "We would also like to take this opportunity to give a special thank-you to everyone...Without you guys Introversion's lasting dream of creating true original games would not be a possible."
Interview
Part 1
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=232199
Four years ago British bedroom outfit Introversion Software was lauded as one of the most promising independent developers in the world, with three critically acclaimed PC games under its belt in the form of Uplink, Defcon and the excellent Darwinia.
... and then it struck a deal to bring Darwinia to Xbox Live Arcade. Almost four years later, we're still waiting.
As the strategy opus finally approaches release on Microsoft's box, Introversion's charismatic MD, Mark Morris recently visited the CVG office to talk about the game and explain what the hell he's been up to.
Part two of our Darwinia+ interview is now live
It feels like Darwinia+ has been in the making forever. Can you give us a brief rundown of what you've been up to until now?
Morris: Well we were actually talking to Microsoft about bringing Darwinia to Xbox before Xbox Live Arcade was even announced. Our plan was to quickly port the PC version over to Xbox Live Arcade - a quick and dirty port - and it'd be job done in six months, something like that.
Microsoft were umming and ahhing a bit and we went over to the IGF Awards where we picked up a few awards that night. Literally as I was walking off stage Ross Erickson, who was the big man at Microsoft then, bumped into me and said 'alright, we'll take it'. I was too drunk to actually care at the time!
Darwinia+ Official trailer
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Darwinia+ Official trailer
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We went away and did the actual technical work and meanwhile Microsoft said 'we need some multiplayer in there; you guys have to put multiplayer in for it to go on Live Arcade'. Darwinia in its first form has actually been a massive multiplayer war game - that was the original concept. So again we thought 'this is going to be pretty simple, we'll just turn the multiplayer back on and in six months we'll be away'.
We just couldn't get it right, it was shit. All we did was put multiplayer games into the Darwinia landscape, tried to throw and objective or two in there and it just didn't work. We just couldn't put it out and the time, we needed to deal with the problem properly.
So we started work on different multiplayer levels, designing proper maps and all the rest of it. Before long we realised that we had quite a lot of content in terms of the multiplayer so we thought what we'll do is launch this game as Multiwinia, we'll launch it as a whole complete sequel to Darwinia on PC and 360 with the original game as DLC.
Microsoft kind of said to us, 'no we don't want you to do that, we wanted Darwinia - that's what you signed up for'. So we kind of said, 'alright, this is your decision, we'll put Multiwinia out on PC with a big PR storm and Darwinia+ will come out on 360 later on'.
It didn't quite work out that way... Multiwinia came out and did quite well but there wasn't as much interest in it as we thought there would be. I also think to a certain extent at Introversion we'd gotten used to people being interested in our games and we thought that was going to carry on. For some reason with Multiwinia it didn't happen and I think it was because it looked like Darwinia, it was a sequel but people didn't really know - we'd announced it as an add-on pack.
So it didn't really work out and World of Goo came out at exactly the same time too, which really hammered Multiwinia hard into second and third slot.
Did you find Microsoft's constant requests for revisions frustrating?
Morris: We were incredibly frustrated. Everything we did they basically said was not good enough. Everything; the menu system within the game we were quite happy with but they said 'this doesn't say HD proposition, this doesn't say Xbox 360, this doesn't say new, novel... this isn't good enough'. We must have gone back with four or five menu iterations - something as simple as that.
We hadn't realised how important the outer game experience was to Microsoft. We sort of thought the only thing that mattered was the game itself but Microsoft had a different view. That wanted all of the "charm and character" of Darwinia, as they described it, like the intro sequence, the boot loaders and all this other stuff we did on PC brought over to the 360 - but updated, HD-ed and 'sex-ified'.
Creatively we were a bit fed up with Darwinia. We've been working on it for a long time and also from a business perspective we were getting fed up because the idea was that this was going to be a six month port and yet now we were on year two.
But at the same time Microsoft always backed up what they said with quite good evidence and facts - they were quite reliable. They did this huge usability report for us and it was like 200 pages of problems people were having when they were playing Darwinia+. You can't ignore that, you can't go 'yeah actually the controls are fine', you have to respond.
It was quite difficult because Darwinia and Multiwinia are quite different games so harmonising the controls between the two was a quite difficult problem. But eventually we got there and I think when we were finished we were very, very proud of the end result, which is why at the back of our manual we wrote, 'this is the best version of Darwinia we have ever made - the director's cut'.
It's only been in the last couple of years that RTS games have broken through on to consoles, so did you get any influence from Command & Conquer and all those games in terms of controls?
Morris: Not really if I'm being completely honest. The controls really came from first principles, experimenting and trying to get it right. It's very difficult, there are always problems. I think with Darwinia there are certain ways that it behaves that we couldn't get away from; if we'd have implemented it differently there would've been a corresponding problem to try and solve.
So we kind of found a healthy medium; there's a crosshair floating around on the screen because in the PC version you can right click to throw a grenade where your cursor is and we wanted to replicate that.
It took a long time because especially in Multiwinia the controls are subtly different. Initially they were very different, so you'd learn things in the Darwinia tutorial that then wouldn't hold true in Multiwinia and that just confused the fuck out of people. People don't tend to struggle anymore, which is good.
Part 2
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=232212
So Darwinia+ is obviously an XBLA exclusive. Why no PSN release?
Morris: When you're a small developer you kind of have to go with whatever you're offered. I would prefer a world where we could put our content out on 360 and we could put it out on PSN, because I think that being able to do that is really going to enable small developer to take risks.
Defcon
Is PSN better setup for small developers to get their games on the service?
Morris: I think there are different challenges with Sony. With Microsoft your approval is given at the start, as long as you deliver what you said you'd deliver you're going to launch, where as it's not like that with Sony. Sony's clearance for launch comes quite later and you have to invest quite a lot of time before you get it. That's a problem because it means you have to invest a lot of time and effort and then you're in a much weaker negotiating position because they could turn around and say 'we don't want it'.
To be fair, I'm sure if Microsoft wasn't happy with what you'd delivered they'd say 'you need to fix this'.
How much does Introversion need Darwinia+ to be a success? Are you banking on it financially?
Morris: Our success is inextricably linked with every project that we make. We haven't been able to get away from serial game development yet, which means that all of our money is generated from sales of the previous game and some back catalogue sales that really help out - Valve helps us a lot.
There is a minimum sales figure for Darwinia+, a level that it has to achieve. If it doesn't achieve that then we don't have enough money to continue going - simple as that. We know how much money we're going to make from the back catalogue next year so we have to hit this minimum sales level.
So if fans want to see more they should buy this game?
Morris: Yeah, basically. That's the message. There isn't any other mystic source of income for us, we haven't got reserves.
Would it be fair to say that Introversion is still looking for its big hit then, that game that will take all the pressure off?
Morris: I think that we've spent four years developing a game which is a hell of a long time and expensive. I think it would be disingenuous for me to say we haven't had a hit yet - I think we've had four. We've done well. What happened though is we were so young and inexperienced when we started out that we didn't know how long this project was going to take. We didn't really attack it in the way that we would attack it now.
Subversion
We don't need Darwinia+ to be a massive runaway success. We know the figures that Space Giraffe did and they're not particularly high. As long as we do as well as Space Giraffe we'll be OK, so we're kind of hoping we're going to hit that sort of level. At the same time, I didn't drive here in my Bentley which is kind of the reason we started Introversion! I'd like a game that just goes stellar, of course I would. But in terms of Darwinia, this was the best game we released from a critical perspective and I really hope that the 360 players enjoy it as much as the PC gamers did.
What's next for Introversion?
Morris: We are working on a game called Subversion next. We haven't said much about it, we're kind of in a creative jamming phase. The way that I think you should make games is by taking as long as you need to understand what the game is going to be like. It's quite rare that you have a Defcon moment, wake up and go, 'yeah I can see this entire game'. Usually you've got an idea for a game and you want to see how the pieces fit together.
On Subversion we've started with city generation. So we can automatically generate cities now and if you check out our website you'll see all of this stuff. We're generating ten kilometres by ten kilometres and the idea is that within every building in a city we want to then auto-generate a room, and then some sort of missions will then be taking place within that automatically generated environment.
So it's quite similar to Uplink but all in a virtual world. So imagine taking the virtual world of Uplink into the physical world of Subversion. That's kind of what we're trying to do and we're just trying to see where we can get with that at the moment. So that's the next big IP for us.
Screenshots
Video
Youtube
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Darwinia++&search_type=&aq=f
Gametrailers
http://www.gametrailers.com/game/darwinia/12549
Previews
IGN XBLA
http://xboxlive.ign.com/articles/103/1030663p1.html
CVG
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=189684
UStream Video Preview
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/darwinia-gameplay-preview
OXM UK
http://www.oxm.co.uk/article.php?id=14747
Achievements
http://www.xbox360achievements.org/game/darwinia/achievements/
There are 12 achievements with a total of 200 points.
Prodigy 10
Rescue 30 or more Darwinians in the Darwinia Tutorial
Fastidious 15
Eliminate every single monster on any map in Darwinia (excluding Garden)
Turning the Tide 15
Activate the Construction Yard, begin manufacturing Armour and obliterate the Ant Infestation
Savior 25
Complete the Single Player Campaign
Clear Vision 10
Upgrade any research program all the way to level 4
The Bridge 10
Complete the Epilogue and help the Darwinians launch their first rocket
Warzone Victor 10
Win 5 games in any Multiwinia game mode
Master of Multiwinia 25
Win a game in every Multiwinia game mode
Warzone Explorer 25
Play a game on every Multiwinia map
Online Commander 15
Win a game of Multiwinia on Xbox LIVE
Share the Love 10
Invite 5 other players to games of Multiwinia
Stick Man Slaughter 30
Kill 65,536 Enemy Multiwinians
Reviews: Pending