Little girls will save the industry!

Capucine looks like a very promising game. Some students at Supinfogame, France, have created a PC demo for a game ultimately intended for Wii. I have no idea if there’s any plans to actually commercialize it. But it’s heart warming to see that there are at least some young designers who are not stuck in the battle/race/action cliché.

Sure, it looks rather nasty (the graphics and animations could use a woman’s hand! 😉 ) and the music is cheesy. But their hearts and minds are in the right place!

Capucine is based on four fundamental principles:

• Give life rather than take it.
• A unique gameplay element: the beam of light.
• Build your own path.
• The player creates his own enemies.

Sounds like a game you know? 😉

I like the simple game mechanic of an all powerful beam of light coming from the protagonist’s hand. The creators realize that it is more fun to do things in a game than to not do them, which is what most game designers seem to think these days with their “challenging obstacles” leading to having to do the same stupid thing over and over again. Don’t get me started…

It strikes me that what this industry needs is a combination of fresh minds and experience. But the people with experience are stuck in the 8-bit era and the fresh ideas come from newcomers. How many more decades to go until we have a 80-year old game designer who started gaming on Playstation 2?…