What's New?
Beta 2 is released on 12/30/2011! Download Now, and Happy new year!
What's PROJECT-0 ?
PROJECT-0 is a code name of a developing game that will be awesomely fun!
Why are you so sure that it'll be fun?
I have a theory about how fun it would possibly be for a given system.
Traditionally thinking, fun is not quantizable. But I don't think it's that absolute.
What if pokers don't have any color or icon or tag on them? Then they're nothing more than just white papers right? A single white papers is no fun at all - unless you can paint or write on it, then there's a little fun, but if you add some more rules and more pieces of them to make more combinations, it'll become more and more fun. That's a simple example of how the "funness" of a system increases along with the "complexity" of it.
But using the word "complexity" is not really accurate. I prefer the term "fun entropy" - it's cool. In information theory, entropy refers to the maximum information that an object could contain. Clearly, not every information feels fun to human beings - only those that could make sense to them. But that doesn't change the big picture.
Wait, there's another problem, I had fun with pokers years ago, but now I don't like it anymore, why? Probably because I'm sick of it. But more technically speaking, it's because I've traversed most of the possibilities that the poker game provides. The mother nature make us human beings not being attracted to known things, so once an unknown becomes known, it's not fun anymore, and that's not anybody's fault, it's mother nature's.
Then how to increase the fun entropy of a game to a level that is so fun that players could never ever get sick of it? The answer is simple and yet complex - provides infinite choices to the players! Well, not really infinite but the number shall be big enough.
PROJECT-0 is aimed to provide a solution to that problem. We exploit freedom on multiple domains to form a choice space that is so large that a player would take decades to traverse across. So it definitely will be awesomely fun!
Why does it looks like minecraft?
Minecraft is a great game and a greate example of how freedom is exploited on several domains. In that sense, it's very different from tranditional games such as WoW, Half Life, or Need For Speed, etc. Tranditional games follow a pattern that the game content are mostly pre-built by the game developers and can be played directly but also can be traversed pretty fast. But minecraft goes another way that much of the game content can be created by the players and be played by other players. The very basis of it is that the shape of the world can be modified by players. And clearly, the shape of the world is one of the domains I mentioned above. And that makes PROJECT-0 looks like minecraft at a first glance.
Why is it different from minecraft?
Well, by the time 12/1/2011, it's not much different, and in fact, it's more like a subset of minecraft. But that's changing, we're exploiting more domains and it will diverse at some point from minecraft. It'll be a different great game than minecrfat.
When will it be released?
Probably never - just joking:)
The answer is that I don't know. There's plan for 10 betas now and each one takes about 1 month. And after that, there're probably more betas coming, depending on the state of the game.
Please visit here frequently to check out what's going on.
And you can also help accelerating the developing process by Joining Us.