Hanging With The Project Spark Developers
A quick eye prod at the Steam Hardware Survey shows me that the stupid, hateful, and barely useable Windows 8 is the second most popular OS on there. 13.34% of those that responded to the survey use it. For you precious few (actually a healthy chunk), I have arranged a treat: a look at Project Spark. Microsoft's really rather charming attempt to do a Little Big Planet-esque and Gameglobeish build your own game thing, is the only thing I've ever seen that made me want to have access to Windows 8. As Adam showed earlier on, the community has already cloned plenty of games and genres to show the platform's capabilities, and now it's the developer's turn. Thirty Imperial Minutes of tools and tips are below.
It mostly shows off the physical manipulation of the world: tools that prettily pluck at the land, drawing out walls, mushing the ground down into into the water table, that sort of thing. There are details, though: doors and water splashes. People will get lot out of the game's brains: each object has a brain, basically states and reactions you can apply to everything, and what you can do with that turns out to be really nice: they made a rock that acted like a shark.
The best bit is when the demo fails and they run to the mouse for help. Old school PC gaming to the rescue.