Exclusive look at the indie game "Forging Life" - It's a jungle out there

For several years their has been a tendency towards making games more accessible and easier for players to get into.

More focus has been put into ensuring that games never frustrate a player and that they always feel like the center of attention in the game world.
This is a development that I am mostly pretty happy with, as I described in my post "Please Dumb Down My Games".

Forging Life can ambitiously be called a "world simulator"

However, even a lover of casual games can find himself wanting more of a challenge.
Sometimes you *want* a game that tests the limits of your skills and is not afraid to punch you in the face if you mess up.
The success of Demon's Souls is a testament to the fact that there is a demand for a game like this.

And Minecraft showed us that players are also perfectly happy with running around in a large world, where it is left to the player to make their gameplay.

The indie game "Forging Life", developed by a couple of Danish guys embraces some of these elements that you'll find in Demon's Souls and Minecraft, throws in a pinch of Ultima Online's sense of being just an insignificant cog in the machine and mixes it all together with some elements of their own to make a tasty stew of survival goodness.

Seeing the basic first person graphics of Forging Life you can be forgiven for immediately thinking "Minecraft", but the developers are keen to emphasize that this is quite different from the Swedish block based build-em up.

Forging Life gives you a whole fully functioning world for you to survive and thrive in

At its core Forging Life is a game about surviving in a fully functioning (and dangerous) world.
Surviving in this world is going to take effort. You'll need shelter and you'll have to worry about food and water.
Through crafting you are able to make yourself some basic weapons, which you can use to go hunting with.
Of course, not all animals will take kindly to being hunted, and you have to be careful of getting mauled by prey that does not care at all for being poked with a small pointy stick.

Of course, finding prey is dependent on an ecosystem that supports whatever animal you're hunting.
Another big part of Forging Life is the dynamic ecosystem that features growing plants, mutations from one generation to the next in the wildlife and disease.
All animals will need food to survive, so if you clean out all the edible plants in the area you're gonna leave the local herbivores starving and dying.
Or maybe those plants just disappeared by themselves because it didn't rain for a month, or the temperature suddenly plummeted. These factors will impact the vegetation of Forging Life.

Plants in Forging Life are subject to parameters like soil conditions and fertilization.
Perhaps we'll get to...um..."manually" fertilize plants

Once you're nice and cozy in your camp the fun doesn't end there.
Forging Life is going to feature NPC's. Some may be unfriendly bandits, but others could be travelers looking for a place to spend the night in the wilderness, or merchants looking to trade.
This offers meaningful incentive to keep improving your settlement and explore the world, even after you've set yourself up for basic survival.

Whether you're chopping down trees, making torches or chugging spears at bears, Forging Life features a skill system that works much in the same manner that we've seen in Ultima Online or the Elder Scrolls games.
That means that you gain skill points in the relevant skill by actually using it. Chop down trees and your wood chopping skill will go up, as well as related attributes like strength.
If you stop using these skills for a long time, you'll find yourself getting rusty and your skills will slowly start to deteriorate again, so use it or lose it, mister!

It gets spooky in the forest after dark. Hold me!

Forging Life has been in development for a couple of years, but is still in a very early pre-alpha state of development. The game could potentially be really interesting for gamers looking for a less structured experience that also offers up a good bit of challenge and sense of satisfaction.

For more information of Forging Life, check out the Forging Life Website.



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