Curiosity is "simple" and "crazy", says Molyneux
In his keynote speech at Unite 2012, legendary creative Peter Molyneux gave a little insight into what inspired his first independent title, cube-breaking social game Curiosity.
As reported by Gamasutra and GamesIndustry, Molyneux described Curiosity as an "experiment" while 22 Cans works on a mysterious "big game".
"It is a brave concept. What they intimate on Twitter is that it's crazy," he said.
"And it is crazy. But we've got to do something different. We've got to be crazy. We've got to experiment with these new things. We can't just lock ourselves away in ivory towers, coming up with a concept and just releasing it. Those days are gone. Forever."
Curiosity's core concept is that players click to remove square from an ever-shrinking block of 64 billion parts. Each layer will reveal new decorations and effects, and players can chain together clicks for multipliers, and buy items to knock off more blocks with each click. One player will remove the last block and see what is inside. It's a very simple concept and suits Molyneux down to the ground.
"One of the reasons I really wanted to leave my beautiful, wonderful, safe place at Microsoft was to have a single idea. For me, having one idea that I and my team utterly, completely, obsessively, focus on is the reason that I left," he said.
"The scariest thing for a designer isn't complex stuff. It isn't a quest with a story and an interesting outcome. The scary thing is simplicity. "That is terror. That is our abyss. That is the place we don't want to go, when we have to design the most simple and purest thing and make it delightful," he added.