GDC ’10: Hands-on Interview With Eskil Steenberg on Love pt. 1

I caught up with designer/producer/one-man-army Eskil Steenberg at GDC this year, and interviewed him on his incredible one-man-project: Love. Check out the video below then read on for part one of our interview.

Eskil: Hi I’m Eskil

<Eskil shows me some gameplay on his laptop. It’s running slowly>

So yeah, this is the settlement I built for my previous demo.

Dan: So is this on the server, or is this a local build?

Eskil: This is a local server right now, which is why it runs kind of crappy because I’ve got stuff… So this actually makes the area around this editable and I can use this edit tool and I can grab at it and I can grab this environment and just start pulling up like this. Say a wall, and I can probably build a door in the wall, which is kind of cool.

<Eskil quickly builds a random wall in the area and builds a door to go along with it.>

I don’t know, a pretty pointless wall, but it’s a wall. And you can actually do the opposite, so you can pull down and build a trench here or something. I don’t know what we’re building, just showing you what you can build.

Dan: Can you dig down forever?

Eskil: No, you cannot as these blocks go down and it’s thinner and at one point you’ll hit water and then you’ll drown. So be aware of that one. [laughs]

Dan: So it’s like what would happen when I tried to dig a hole to china when I was a kid.

Eskil: Yeah, but actually here’s a wall so let’s build a little house. So it’s really easy to build stuff and anyone can go nuts and crazy building advanced stuff. Now the game is really about finding tokens and normally you find tokens in the environment and I’m using my cheat menu to create a token as if we found it. So this is a token, this is what they look like, it’s on an altar. I’m going to pick that one up, and now I’ve actually got something down there. That’s actually a really cool thing I’ve got down there; that’s a manufacturing unit which I’ll place over here.

<Eskil places the unit>

So now I’ve added a little bit of feature here, so I’m going to use my binoculars that I have and point to it and record the position of this, and when I return I have this little thing that rotates and it has coordinates. So now I’m going to use my tool to take this power source I have here and I’m going to set it to these coordinates and I can put in any coordinates I want, but let’s take some coordinates that I’ve saved which is the coordinates to the other thing. So now I’m actually powering this thing. So yeah, we’re powering the manufacturing. So now we have another manufacturing unit that was on before. So I’m going to pick up this one and another one and these are actually chaffes, those are power-up that I’ll use. I’m just going to show what this does. Woo, and this actually disrupts a lot of radio communication around here.

<Some lasers whizz past>

So we have some AI sneaking up on us. He’s going to destroy our city, that’s not good. Luckily for me I can bring up some really awesome guns. So I got my, oh man, he’s killed my power source! Let’s see, if there’s any… they usually don’t come along. There are pretty few of them in the beginning of the game, but I haven’t built an advanced city yet, but when I get more stuff, they’ll be angrier at me and actually do more stuff. So actually they think there’s a base over here.

<As Eskil goes from place to place, names of locations pop up.>

Dan: Are the names procedurally generated?

Eskil: No, but you don’t get to choose your name, I choose it for you. That’s just because I hate people’s names in games, they always name them themselves some stupid name, so I’ll do it for them.

Dan: They’re kicking your ass.

Eskil: This is a multiplayer game so I’m not supposed to be able to fight them on my own. I have right now a gun that is an end-of-game gun, the slug rifle, my favourite gun. I know I shouldn’t have one because I’m the developer, but I still do.

Dan: You want one anyway?

Eskil: Yeah. So these guys, I’m messing with them, which is not going to help me in the future, probably just make them mad. And they respawn so it’s kind of pointless killing them. So yeah, these are actually… yeah they’re mad.

Yeah, so this is an area, so different areas have different names. So you’ll find that the design of this is really different.

Dan: Colossal Fields, and there are big colossus like towers, that’s why I was wondering if they were procedurally generated.

Eskil: They are procedurally generated, but the area code that makes it is actually written by me. So you’ll find an area in your game in your game that will look similar but not be exactly the same.

Here’s a turret over there, shooting at me and it’s mad as hell. Actually what’s cool about this is that they actually destroy geometry. So now I’m hiding behind this pillar, let’s see if it figures that out. So, just got to wait for them to pass… but if I sneak a look, they’ve actually made holes in the walls. So they can really destroy the environment and I can find those rockets as well but they’re really rare and only the AI can manufacture them. So here’s a beach area.

Dan:So when I play this, I’ll have a similar but not identical beach area?

Eskil: Yeah, but it will change and the cool thing is not that it’ll be different. Who cares if it’s different to me or you? What’s cool is that it will actually change and over time it will start looking different. So if you see a mountain, tomorrow that mountain might be gone! Here’s a turret that’s powered and I take out… took a shot, there you go; there’s actually a breaker here- ouch! Still had some power in it, ouch!

So yeah, it’s a power source. You can use power sources to get around the world. Here’s another one I can… if I can get up their… I can jump actually. Wee! That was good enough. If I grab that I can actually look at this thing. So now, you can see that they start destroying the thing… I’m flying now, just to give you a birdseye view. Cheating like crazy! This starts breaking down and if we come back in a couple of minutes this will be gone. But new ones will appear in new places. So constantly there’s new content, if I destroy an enemy settlement, a new one will appear, with new puzzles and new things. So the procedurally is not really important in creating the world, of course it is for me, as a developer it saves me a huge amount of time.

Dan: Once the world’s there, to keep it going, keep it fresh.

Eskil: Really what’s important is that the game is being designed while you’re playing it. So it can respond to whatever you’re doing in a game… <Eskil is really getting pounded by some enemies>. I should do something about that.

Dan: What is the end game?

Eskil: There is no real end game, it’s just up and down.

<Eskil finds another enemy settlement>

So actually you can see here they’re still manufacturing here and they’re making bombs which they’re sending them over to another settlement. So they’re really advanced settlements which I can probably use my… so now turning off the power I’m sabotaging them.

Dan: So are you able to do the same thing? To build stuff and send it to other settlements?

Eskil: Yes I can. So pretty much everything they do, I can do. There are some things that are really powerful, the bomb pods for example because they can basically power through things. That means that the player will never get those but on the other hand they can steal them, but can only carry four. It’s kind of rare that they actually use them in any useful way.

Dan: So how many people at a time can play?

Eskil: So it’s about 10 to 15 players on each settlement. That’s a good number, otherwise it’s hard to collaborate if there’s too many people. It gets kind of… But then you can have multiple settlements, there’s no reason to cram into one. So here’s a cool part; there’s a settlement up there and I can’t get to it so I’m going to jump on this thing and I’m going to ride this thing. So now I’ve found a cool way into the enemy’s settlement.

Dan: How many settlements are there?

Eskil: There are five different settlement types for the AI, of those there are five different tribes. And those have one or two settlements for each type. The players can build one for every ten people that are logged on. So if you’re 20 people, you can have two settlements. 21 you can have three.

Dan: So five to ten settlements per maps, per server?

Eskil: Yeah, AI settlements.

Dan: And how many does that equate to in human people?

Eskil: The AI settlements, they don’t have any humans in them. They’re just what you’re attacking. The number of them is decided by the size of the world. I don’t want the world to be too large because you’ll never find your way through it. I want it to be dense, so that you can find new things all the time, it’s not a convenience, it’s not the size, it’s the density.

Dan: Yeah, that’s really cool.

Eskil: Yeah, you got a lot of interesting things to look at and it’s really fun to be around. So if you look at the environment here, it’s not at all designed to be realistic, it’s designed to be good gameplay and to be interesting.

Dan: Sure, realistically, you can’t add and subtract land at your whim.

Eskil: Yeah. Ouch! Now I got killed by some bad stuff. Yeah, they’re probably really close to me now.

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Stay tuned for more of our extensive interview with Eskil Steenberg on his one-man MMORPG, Love.