Molyneuxian Commandments: God Game Crest

God game Crest sounds like a Peter Molyneux idea, and I say that with the greatest of affection. It's the sort of thing he might idly muse about in an interview, not realising people might then expect that to appear in a game. Crest is a civilization-building strategy where players have no direct control over their followers, instead laying down commandments to influence their behaviour.

Developers Eat Create Sleep are trying to ride that old bucking crowdfunding bronco, and have released a prototype so you can give it a bash. Come have a look.

Your followers need to build, harvest, eat, reproduce, die, and all that god game stuff, directed by Your intervention. Commandments take the form of triggers and reactions, like "If you have high Fertility you should take much Food" or "If you have low Chastity you should have low Conservative." All of which qualities affect how they live. Faith is fuzzy though. Some might be slow to adapt to new commandments, even abandon them, or follow their own interpretations.

That's the idea, anyway. I spent a few minutes tinkering with the demo and will return later to see how weird, complex, and contradictory commandments can get, and how that changes societies.

Eat Create Sleep are looking for $20,000 (£12 grand) in crowdfunding to pay for four months of development. They hope to use that together with funding from other sources to make it super fancy, but if all that doesn't come together they say they'll still finish the game. $15 (£9) would get you a copy of the game when it's finished, with a Steam key if it passes Greenlight.

Have a look. Don't worry, this triangle grid doesn't appear over everything in-game: