Have you ever thought about the fact that you can’t prove that everyone experiences life and consciousness in the same way? It’s a really interesting philosophy problem and today we are talking with Edward Atkin who took this idea and made a game out of it.
Hey Gilded Octopus!
I’m a mostly solo dev working on Other Minds – its a 2d platform game where you can take control of the enemies, characters and bosses. I do all the coding and graphics and I’ve had some friends making sounds and music with me. I’ve been working on it since around the end of May and released a demo for it recently (4 days ago). I started up making games when I was about 11-12 (although I wasn’t very good at it for a while) using Gamemaker 6 and then had about 10 years break from it. Started making games again about a year ago when I had some cool ideas I wanted to work on! Hope that helps!
Awesome do you have some examples of the artwork?It sounds very unique. What gave you the inspiration for it?
Other Minds by Edward Atkineatkin.itch.io I have a few decent screenshots on my itch page here: https://eatkin.itch.io/other-minds Happy to send some other stuff over if you’d like. I used a low resolution pixel art style because drawing is never something I’ve really done before, so I tried to use a style that lets me have some flaws and get away with it.
The name is from a problem in philosophy called the problem of other minds, which is a problem where you cannot show that anyone else experiences consciousness in the same way as you. I was thinking back to when I was very young, it always used to be something that kind of bothered me – I would never know what it was like to experience life from someone else’s point of view. I had a few ideas based around that for the game, like being able to experience other people’s memories to gain information about how to progress in the game etc, but I decided to keep it simple with just being able to play as the other characters as it still gives a lot of scope for some cool gameplay ideas.
So had you done very much programming before?
I started playing with Gamemaker 6 when I was quite young still and learn the programming language, spent about 5 years messing around with it and then had 10 years off. I managed to pick it up again quite quickly based off past experience. Other than that I briefly did some programming as part of my degree with MATLAB and I have done a little bit of work with VBA in Excel spreadsheets.(sorry for the laye reply by the way, I went to sleep)
What’s your degree in?
I studied mathematical physics
Other Minds has some super cool features like
Features
- Possess enemies/NPCs/bosses/sign posts/cannon balls and control them!
- 8 levels that reward exploration with plenty of secrets
- 1 super secret level
- A multi-phase boss fight
- A cosy house and garden to explore
- A cat that you can play as and pet
- Full gamepad support with rumble (Windows only, sorry)
- Fully rebindable controls
- Adjustable difficulty settings
- Many other interesting options to change
- A killer chiptune-inspired soundtrack
(quoted from Itch.io page)
You can find a game play demo at
Other minds has a super cool premise. I mean who takes a philosophy problem and turns it into a game… this guy does. I’m really looking forward to seeing where this goes. If you are interested in trying it out you can find it at https://eatkin.itch.io/other-minds
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