“It’s awesome!”

I am inclined to agree. Pulled down the demo over Xbox Live and I am very impressed with it. Lego Star Wars was much more combat-oriented, with the gameplay basically consisting of you entering an arena, shooting or eviscerating anything that moved, and then figuring out how to move on to the next arena. David actually had trouble with this because most of the puzzles weren’t explicated very well. Most of them required you to use a Jedi power to open a path for another character, who could then open the door. While David did figure it all out eventually, I had to help him a fair bit and there was some frustration.

Lego Indiana Jones is much closer to a traditional platformer with lots and lots of well-constructed puzzles to solve as well as some combat. And excellent cutscenes – when Lego Indy escapes the first temple after being chased by the ball he is confronted by Lego Belloc, who demands the golden idol. Lego Indy tries to give him Lego C-3PO’s head instead. I don’t care who you are, that’s funny right there.

One of my design philosophies is “Let players be clever, and reward them when they are” and Lego Indiana Jones follows that philosophy well. And frankly I was amazed at how quickly David – without any direction from me – figured everything out. He had no trouble with the puzzles where you had to do something with one character then switch to another because the game made it much more clear what you were supposed to do. After seeing the demo I will definitely be picking it up.

I had another game development-related dream last night.

In it I was at a booth at some sort of trade show watching a demo of a new tech that would make computer-generated characters look much more realistic. The tech simulated a colloidal substance for the characters’ skin, which fixed pointy-head syndrome, allowed for much more realistic skin tones since the top layer of skin is translucent, and – my favorite – allowed for much more realistic modeling of wounds. The demo showed characters getting stabbed, shot and slashed, with the wounds then “healing” in a realistic manner. It even showed wounds healing differently based on the medical care the character got.

The only downside was that when the characters talked, the colloidal surface around their lips would seal when their mouths were closed and then tear away when they opened, making everybody look like zombies. When I pointed this out to the guy manning the demo booth, he made a face. “Yeah, we’re working on that.”