Read this about 3 years ago, and knowing Lionhead this could be part of the 3rd feature, though this is only speculation. This could also be part of the secret game they are working on.
"
March 9, 2005 - "With The Room we're trying to get people to use a computer game in a different way. We're trying to get an emotional response," says Peter Molyneux about his game that actually isn't a game at all. That's right,
The Room is never coming out, ever. It does incorporate elements to be found in Lionhead's mysterious
Project Dimitri, however, so we'll give it a look anyway. We begin in a hyper realistic interpretation of a small apartment. The lights above bloom softly, the protruding crown molding casts striking shadows and the texture work appears incredibly detailed. The room is barely furnished and hardly stylish, but we find ourselves particularly impressed by the tightly woven upholstery of the love seat and the way in which the soft pillowed backing rolls as it's depressed and otherwise toyed with. Everything else in the apartment reacts believably when screwed around with, too -- there are the rolling oranges, flopping sacks and falling blocks, at least. Clearly this is intended to be a demonstration of high-end physics and photorealistic textures that perfectly illustrates how the combination of the two can make for truly remarkable environments.
Molyneux moves us along by mentioning that the first objective of
The Room was to create as detailed an area as humanly possible. To this end, the individual pages of a couple dozen books on the bookshelf were even modeled and bound with the same mathematical wizardry that determined how other junk should fall and bend. And even better than the physics were the visuals that made for such astonishing believability. We found ourselves honestly surprised at how we could be astonished by a cruddy apartment. But the wood grain, smudged mirrors, intricate fabrics, sloppy wall paper and flaking paint were just too incredible to disregard. It made it all feel real, but then that wasn't the point.
Lionhead's second objective with
The Room was to actually create the surreal -- to take gaming beyond the fantastic. This is where the demonstration's portal system comes into play. From what we can tell, the demo is made up of interconnected rooms joined only by a variety of physically impossible portals. Each room applies a different set of laws to its own narrow universe and allows for only a specific set of actions to be performed within that universe. The rooms we saw did appear to be governed by the same properties, but that didn't stop the crazy from happening.
Molyneux first demonstrated how Lionhead could manipulate a player's conception of what a game can really be just by changing how he or she perceives the environment. He first stood in a plain room and then moved through one innocuous portal into a medieval area. He then opened a chest in that castle hall that looked down upon the room he just exited from. Once he jumped into the chest, he shrunk in size and appeared again in the original room. Very trippy.
Back in the castle hall, Peter showed us two basic portals, one big and one small. They connected to one another and outputted to the same room hall we stood in. Something thrown into one portal would then immediately appear out of the other one. Molyneux had an orange thrown through the small portal and when it exited the larger one it increased in size to represent the difference between the big and small. To demonstrate the opposite, he grabbed a large rod and floated it through the larger portal so that it would exit the smaller one. Sure enough, the end that protruded from the smaller portal was significantly smaller than the end he was still jamming into the larger one.
The other truly cool portion of the demo was the way in which Peter could manipulate "digital clay." In one room there sat a very drab chunk of white stuff Molyneux could duplicate and attach to itself in cloned cubes. By positioning the cubes in certain way and then clicking a button, the gooey stuff would transform into an object related to its current shaped -- a wad of digital clay molded into a "T" created a telephone while a pattern that looked like a chair indeed created a chair. We don't know how rigid this system is, but it certainly seems capable of facilitating some unique gameplay ideas.
Even though the portals, physical manipulations, and digital clay could be used to create exciting puzzles that could redefine the
Myst genre,
The Room is still not a game and will never be released. Hopefully
Project Dimitri will make a public appearance soon and incorporate
The Room's better ideas though. Rest assured, if it does, we'll report. "
Reaper over and out
From :
IGN: GDC 2005: The Room
