APB presents itself as a grand scale, multiplayer version of cops and robbers. The character customization videos that have been shown as some gaming/tech events is astonishing. When I watch the video, I think it goes so far that I lean to the side of this is TOO MUCH customization. I’m never gonna just be satisfied and get into the game…
Once through the epic character creation/customization phase, you presumably choose whether you want to play cop (enforcer as they call it) or robber (criminal). From there you exist in a persistent world (think MMO) playing a 3rd person action game. You choose the crew/gang of people that you befriend and strive to have the city run in your vision (rampant crime and graffiti for criminals or arrested criminals and keeping order for enforcers).
The gameplay sounds somewhat GTA-ish. There will be missions you can choose to undertake or you can simply move through the world distributing your form of justice as you see fit.
As it’ll be running on Unreal Engine 3, it will definitely have the capability of looking beautiful. It has a release date of Spring of 2010, but as it is MMO-ish in nature, I don’t really expect it to make a release date set so far in advance.. but I guess only time will tell.. and I’ll definitely be listening.
Project Dooley has reached a release version. I’ve termed it version 0.9. That is to say the game is fully functional and playable. And things should work smoothly and in reasonable amounts of time.
I’m giving it a 0.9 version instead of the full-fledged 1.0 because I want to add more content to the game. I’m going to get more images (puzzles) in the game and give the user the ability to select how many tiles to separate the puzzle into.
As I get those choices added and presented to the user, I will also be working on an XBox 360 port of the game. Hopefully that will be a pedestrian matter, but we’ll see, we. will. see.
Controls for the game are the arrow keys on the keyboard to slide tiles around and press the enter key to show or hide the numbers overlaying the tiles.
If you try the game, please don’t hesitate to leave me comments about its functioning and features.. I am open to working in some more features while I am adding the customizable aspects.
The Games section is your key to happiness (or access to download Project Dooley.. whichever happens).
