SEATTLE — An upcoming minmalist independent game, fields, imagines an open world where you forgo any exploration whatsoever and just like, fucking chill out for a couple of days and lay on the ground instead. Sounds pretty good, if I’m being honest.
“Game developing is hard, dude,” said Solomon Ludd, a game developer that had recently quit his job with a triple A company to make games on his own. “And guess what? I want to get off of work at a decent hour every day, so this game is just laying in a field, okay? There’s no scores or enemies or inventory. You really just choose face up or down and that’s about it.”
The new game, due sometime “this year I guess,” recently gained a lot of attention after a demo was positively received by fans and critics alike. The overriding consensus is that like, I don’t know, sometimes it’s pretty chill to just kind of fuck off for a while.
“This is the game of the year, easily,” said popular YouTube personality Gabriel “Bonebot” Spitzley. “It doesn’t have the bells and whistles of most other games, but I’m not going to lie, spending hours laying on my damn ass in a field and not worrying about fuck else is the most thrilling escape I’ve had in years.”
The project initially started as a more ambitious simulation game that tasked the player with building a functioning farm and subsequent shipping business, but eventually evolved into its current state, which sees the player mostly just laying around in a series of fields, ranging from wheat to grass.
“There were a few things I wanted to put in there, even after I decided to scale it back,” Ludd said. “But then it came time to do animation tests and motion capture and all that, and I wasted a lot of precious programming time laying in real fields. It was nice, man.”
Ludd has hinted at a possible nighttime mode for the game once it is released in full, “if anyone feels like modding that in or whatever.”
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