Q&A With Eskil Steenberg, Part 1

[iamacyborg]

Part 1 of the Q&A with Eskil Steenberg from his trip to London earlier this month. This is about 15 minutes worth of audio, there's another 75 to go!



Gaming Love: Zex asks, will there be a single player game?

Eskil Steenberg: No!

No?

That’s a simple answer. Just too much work that wouldn’t be connected with the other thing, I think.

I think it’s probably Minecraft that’s kind of, shown how big something like, well, sandboxy games can get. Love is completely different but a lot of people would probably assume that they’re quite similar.

I haven’t actually played it. Somebody gave me an account and I haven’t played it. A few weeks ago I was visiting their apartment, where they make it. I know Notch a little bit, and we met a bunch of times. They actually want me to contribute. Apparently they have problems with performance, so he wants to use vertex arrays, and I’m currently writing a vertex array system thingy, so I’m going to head over there some day and give him that code and help him use it.

Okay. Windmill asks; what can a fan like myself do to help hype up love?

Tell the universe. Everyone should be a lot better at all the stuff I stuck at, like social networking and Facebook.

I did actually create a Facebook page.

I haven’t actually announced it, I should really do that.

Yeah!

I would really say that those are the things that I’m not very good at, kind of, community stuff, and that’s why I so appreciate all the websites around Love. That really, really helps me because I suck at all that stuff. It’s really, really appreciated and, just, get other people to play.

Windmill recently made a thread on Facepunch, which got a few more people interested. I know that Something Awful had quite a presence during the alpha stage.

I think also that, there are some websites that I would like to be on but I haven’t been on, like, Penny Arcade is huge.

Yeah, that kind of, killed Minecraft when they did one comic.

Yeah, they actually told me that. And, I think, I don’t want to be mean to them, because they’re my friends, but I think a big reason why they got so huge was because they got flagged by Paypal, which, I’ve gotten too so it’s no big deal. But they made a big angry post about it which got slashdotted and it went out to all the tech press that were writing about it...

Anti Paypal people.

Yeah, and it sort of went into the whole, you know CNET and Wired and those people that look at the technology business, like, you know, Facebook Vs Microsoft Vs Paypal Vs, you know, and, they wrote about it and that I think made it really big. And then he said, actually that a lot of what the press is about is it feeds itself, “we’re successful and therefore we’ll write about it”.

Rock Paper, Shotgun did a Minecraft diary, sort of at the same time as Penny Arcade, which I think Jim mentioned on a New Years Eve post saying that that was the biggest traffic they’d had, so it’s just, massive.

There’s an advantage in what they have in that you can use it as an art tool. So people can build crazy stuff and then post it on websites, and, Love is much more, you’re in the world and living your own experience.

Do you think that Minecraft has opened the gaming press more to the indie scene, do you think that’s helped you? I mean, you got a lot of press anyway before.

I don’t think it matters really. I think the indie scene has gotten a lot of press for a couple of years now , and maybe it’s my fault but I don’t see myself too much in that crowd. It’s kind of like, the indie scene has gotten very much about making small fun games you play for a very short period, or like, small Tetris like addictive games and Love is not about that. Love is about making the games that I thought everyone would be making by now. The big dynamic where you can do anything and it’s all happening while you’re there and you have all this freedom and the game responds to what you do.

I think that’s the problem with the big studios, they’re too conservative with what they make.

Yeah, but on the other hand, I’ve sort of learnt by doing. I’ve read up on games like Spore and I sort of get it now a lot more. I see what the problem Spore had and can relate them to the problems I had. I probably think my game’s better than Spore but they’re the same sort of thing. You get these problems like, if you get webbed feet on this thing is it going to swim faster or slower and, of course it’s going to swim better but how’s it going to run and if you die, can you figure out that, oh it was because it was slow because of the webbed feet. If you actually simulate everything it becomes incredibly hard for the players to see “what did I do wrong”. Getting the correlation between what you’re doing and what happens is hard. In Love that’s incredibly hard because, for instance, you have your settlement and your settlement might be attacked because some other player did something mean to the AI, and that’s why I created the super tokens so it could now be clear that we now have this object here that’s going to piss them off. I think there’s a lot of work to be done, it gets more and more fine grained and tweaking and I think I can do some more animation here, I think I can do some AI doing some more interesting behaviour there and you know.

The start you’ve made with that has changed the game massively and it’s a whole new game really to what we played at launch.

Yeah, so I’ve learnt a lot but it’s still sort of, a lot of people got scared when I made that blog post about “lost in a sea of source code” and it is a little disheartening because I feel that I don’t really know how to do it in a better way, I’ve reached a certain level and from now on I’m going to polish and I’m going to add stuff and I’m going to slow down a little bit. I’m going to add more stuff but I think it’s important to fix stuff and make sure it all works.

Like the pod throwers you added recently, and last time I spoke to you, you mentioned a radar that would capture all this different information like, is it raining, what level the water’s at.

Those things are not too difficult to do and when you build such big systems that change the world you break a lot of stuff but once you’ve built them it’s usually not too hard to add more stuff. So now I have a system for animation, so I can do more animation. I have a system for doing world generation so I can add more stuff. So what I’m thinking about now is, what would make it more clear, what would make it more fun. I think the game should have more feedback for a lot of things.

Like the new screen you get when someone puts down a token, and tribes now telling you that objects placed at whatever coordinate.

Yeah, it’s getting better and one thing that I was thinking about was taking small small steps like, what if I gave the AI a nonsense language, so you could hear the tone of them or maybe you could pick out words. That’s a lot of recording work that way but maybe I could do something in that direction. There’s also simple things like you should have sound when you pick up stuff, there are things like that, more user feedback. It would be nice to have like, let’s imagine that there is an object that you get and in order to unlock it you have to use a super token to open it, and what if the AI can get a hold of this object too, so they’d be like, we need to steal this super token so we can destroy that thing, or, take back that super token from these guys because they can use it to build a super weapon, something like that.

Kind of, mini quests within the game.

Make things more clear like that. That’s what I’m thinking about right now.





That's it for now, I hope to get the next parts of the Q&A transcribed as soon as possible for you all.

[Windmill]

Can't wait to read the rest. I put it in my OP on the facepunch thread.

[Windmill]

did you ever post part 2?

[iamacyborg]

Not yet, life's been absolutely hectic, so I've not had much time to get anything other than university or job work done. Going to set aside sometime in the next week to get it all released.