Game designer Will Wright, who was the original designer for The Sims, is working on a new project called Proxi with his company Gallium Artists. The mobile game will allow players create worlds out of past memories.
Wright was also part of the teams behind SimCity and Spore, and is known for ambitious games that are just as much science experiments. The new game will give players the opportunity to create artificial intelligences modeled after themselves. According to Wright, this is accomplished by constructing “mems,” which are small scenes that cover the many events and interactions that influence the evolution of the AI.
And instead of building the AI using logic, it looks like Proxi will accomplish this through stories.
Here is a description of the game from its official site:
“The ‘Mems’ are the building blocks of the larger world, a world the player can organize and sculpt to best represent the landscape of their memories.”
Imagine the borough of your childhood, an archipelago of embarrassment, an island of wonderful vacations, each reflecting the look and sound of those Mems.
Now imagine you could share. Just a simple Mem with a friend, or an entire island with family. Or collaborate with multiple players proxi to make a collections of Mems around a shared experience.”
Wright is also holding an art contest for people who want to join the team. It asks developers to recreate three personal memories as environmental scenes using Unity. The studio offers a few examples of their own to show you what mems should can look like.
It’s still unclear exactly what the final project will look like and how it will play. But nevertheless, it sounds interesting.
Proxi has no fixed release date, but is currently planned for mobile release later this year.