I had the ultimate pleasure earlier this week when I downloaded a game called Octodad. In this terribly quirky title you play an octopus who has to continue keeping his cephalopodian nature under wraps while doing menial tasks around his home with his (human) family watching.You do this using your mouse in one of the strangest control schemes I’ve seen in a while.

The game can be downloaded here, and finished in about 20 minutes. Those 20 minutes have you controlling what is basically an octopus in a suit. Yes, it’s as crazy, strange, and fun as you might imagine.

I got the urge to download the game after getting a lovely e-mail from the DePaul Game Experience at Chicago’s DePaul University, who created the game. We got to talking earlier this week, and eventually I sent them off a few questions (since a game like this demands to have questions asked about it).

The first thing I had to ask these guys is how in the hell they came up with the idea of Octodad. It’s a one-of-a-kind idea that wouldn’t have existed without the help of some dinosaurs. John Murphy, producer, said that the game wasn’t supposed to be what it was, instead “we were leaning towards one of a couple of physics-based puzzle-platformer ideas.” Unfortunately, nothing came of that.

The teams’ frustration “with [their] inability to make the puzzle-platformer ideas more interesting” eventually got Nick Esparza (Lead Artist) and Seth Parker (Lead Sound Designer and Composer) to discuss “this idea of a person driving a person, and Nick goes ‘What if it were an OCTOPUS driving a person?’”

From that fantastic idea the team sought out a YouTube video for a game called Jurassic Park: Trespasser, an old PC game with an awkward arm-control mechanic that eventually made its way into Octodad. The team thought the video “was unintentionally hilarious but also compelling in some way. So we brought this idea of an octopus driving a person back to the team, and it slowly just became an idea of the player controlling an octopus, but with these hilarious controls.”

“After we settled on the concept, we knew that the control scheme was going to define the gameplay,” said Jake Anderson, lead designer. Then it was time to focus “on adapting the controls for mouse and keyboard for the sake of accessibility.” The team set off to work “and set up two teams to workshop multiple keyboard-and-mouse control schemes for each mechanic. The more fluid, organic mouse movements were a better fit for the feel of the game, so we tried to minimize keyboard input.”

Now that they knew the mouse was the lead controller, they still had to figure out how much it could do, since it had “limited input capabilities (left click, right click, sometimes scroll wheel). Like the gamepad, we didn’t want to limit the audience by requiring specific hardware on the mouse. We realized that we probably weren’t going to be able to fit everything on the mouse, but we managed to keep the core actions to the mouse.” While the game does use a few keyboard controls, you can see while playing that the team spent a good deal of time with the mouse.

For the story, I wondered if any of the team members had experience fathering children and how accurate the activities in Octodad are to actual fatherhood. John Murphy said no one on staff had “any first-hand experience being a dad. That being said, Octodad is a 100% accurate simulation of fatherhood.” I’m not sure how true that statement is.

So what does the future hold for Octodad? Project lead and writer Kevin Zuhn explained that “we have plans to make a full-length prequel” which may include new tasks such as walking the dog and going grocery shopping. While a prequel is on their minds, they may not reveal how Octodad came to be the head of a suburban family; “whether we’ll reveal Octodad’s mysterious origins…we haven’t decided yet. It’ll take more than one breath to explain how a suited invertebrate achieved the American dream!”

The team has a lot planned for this year’s Game Developers Conference; “an expansion is in the works which will explore our mighty mollusk’s secret designs and bring an end to his charade.” But that’s not all, as Kevin Zuhn said “an expanded game isn’t all we plan on bringing to the Game Developers Conference. We’ve got some other delightful surprises in the works that should really get people moving!” How exciting!

Octodad began life as a puzzle-platformer that, thanks to frustration and an oft-mocked Jurassic Park game, became something much greater and much weirder. The DePaul Gaming Experience has a lot to be proud of. Not only have they made a super-interesting game, they were also selected to the Independent Games Festival’s Student Showcase. Not too shabby for an invertebrate with a weird mustache.

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Richard Wilson is the head of the UK videogames industry trade body TIGA. Since 2008 he has been representing the industry and has been especially active in trying to obtain a tax relief policy from the UK government.

This interview delves into the subject of tax relief and the effects it could have (or not) on the UK’s videogame industry.

Nukezilla: This week EA’s Keith Ramsdale said there should be more pragmatism when campaigning about tax relief. Does TIGA agree with that? Should campaigning be toned down as the UK government starts its programme of austerity cuts?

Richard Wilson: No, absolutely not. I will say Keith Ramsdale is a very nice man, I’ve spoken to him from time to time. But occasionally nice men make mistaken arguments, as on this occasion and Keith is making a mistaken point. The truth of the matter is that the UK is not competing on a level playing field, we know this don’t we? You know this, I know this, Keith knows this.

There are a lot of jurisdictions; Canada in particular, but over 20 states in the United States, France or other countries around the world that have tax breaks for game production or other incentives. So we’re not competing on a level playing field and the UK games industry is suffering.

Our research over the last two years shows that the UK development workforce has shrunk by 9% and investment has fallen by many millions of pounds – that’s seriously bad news. Not just for the UK videogames industry or the people who work in it (although it clearly is bad news for them) but it’s also bad for the UK economy.

We have to campaign for UK tax relief as part of a very sensible package of measures not just to help the UK videogames industry but the entire UK economy. Because actually if we had a powerful, successful and growing videogames industry it would be good for the coalition government and good for the overall economy.

So I completely disagree with Keith’s point and I think it’s a great shame actually that he’s made these remarks because it really damages any unity within the games industry, so I think it’s a great shame. Also, I think Keith in his interview talks about skills for the workforce in the games industry. We have an excellent workforce in the games industry – it’s so good the Canadians come and poach our staff!

What’s missing is the tax environment. I’m not saying that things can’t be done to make our skilled workforce even better, but funnily enough I don’t think it’s so much a problem within the industry – we have an excellent industry – what’s important is that we have incentives to get more people to study science, technology, mathematics in particular in universities. I think that’s the key issue in terms of skills.

Funnily enough, that’s not an issue that’s particular to the UK videogames industry, it’s important for a wide number of industries in the UK. So skills are important, but the real issue that’s affecting the UK games industry is not skills but a lack of a favorable tax environment that helps us compete with our overseas competitors.

NZ:  Ramsdale said that the industry is “flogging a dead horse” by continually campaigning to the government about tax relief when they’ve clearly said they’re not interested. Is there a risk of that souring the relationship between the industry and the government?

RW: So, there’s a couple of points here: There’s been some people in the games industry, including many publishers who have all taken the view that tax breaks are never going to happen – and they were wrong, we proved them wrong. TIGA, with very limited resources launched an almost single-handed campaign, and this is a fact; we waged a campaign almost single-handedly for almost two and a half years. We got tax breaks in the March budget, we had all four political parties before the general election (the Scottish National Party, the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives) all publically supported tax breaks against production, so we changed the political weather and we did that single-handedly with virtually no help from any other trade association. It was very much a TIGA campaign.

There’s always been some people in the industry who are never going to get it and we proved them wrong: we did get it. We had political commitments. However, the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats decided to break their pre-election pledge. We know we’re not unusual in that, we know a lot of people in the country who feel their particular commitments have been broken, but the fact is that we did make progress – we had a commitment from all four parties before the last election to provide for in the March budget.

To say it’s “flogging a dead horse” is bonkers. Also because of TIGA’s campaigning we have kept tax breaks alive politically. There are trade associations and lobbying organisations who would die for the amount of political coverage we’ve managed to achieve on this issue. We’ve had tax breaks raised at Prime Minister’s Questions a couple of weeks in a row, we’re getting tax breaks raised in the floors of the Houses of Commons.

We have made real progress  and the worst thing to do now would be to say “oh, well the government doesn’t want to give us tax breaks, we’ll stop the campaign.” That’s absolutely bonkers because of course the government is going to say “we’re not going to give tax breaks at the present time” because they want an easy life! They want the games industry to stop giving them a hard time. We’re not going to stop giving them a hard time because we believe passionately in this industry, we believe passionately that the UK games industry can keep going.

We care about the companies in this country that want to make a livelihood here and want to be successful and we want to make sure this government understands that the videogames industry has a great part to play in helping the UK economy be rebalanced. Mr. Cameron and other senior politicians in the coalition say they want to rebalance the economy towards export-oriented industries, growing industries and that’s exactly what the UK videogames industry is. Highly skilled, export oriented, low carbon output – what’s not to like!

If you want that industry to grow then you have to look at the facts: 76% of the investment in the videogames industry in the UK comes from overseas publishers. If they’re able to get massive tax breaks for games production in the United States and Canada then they’re much more likely to invest there.

We’ve got a lot of senior people in the games industry; people like Bobby Kotick and THQ who are saying they won’t invest in this country because the tax incentives aren’t there. So, we believe we have the facts, we believe we have the evidence, so we’re not going to give up. We’re going to carry on with the campaign  and I do hope that people in the publishing community in the UK, UKIE in particular, will support this campaign actively. I think it’s really important that publishers get behind this campaign and support it and make it quite clear that they want tax breaks and it’s the number one priority.

NZ: Do you think it’s a case of larger publishers and developers not needing tax relief as much as say, smaller or indie developers. Realtime Worlds, recently collapsed, not necessarily because of a lack of tax breaks, but that incentive would have helped.

RW: Yes, there’s no doubt about it. TIGA represents UK owned and controlled developers overwhelmingly. We do have some publishing members, Activision-Blizzard, for example, is a member of TIGA and we have some other publishers within our membership. But the overwhelming majority of TIGA members are UK-controlled.

That’s not the case I believe with UKIE because they have overwhelmingly publisher controlled and foreign owned and controlled organisations. Obviously they’re an important part of the games industry but clearly they have a different perspective. But because we represent the UK owned and controlled element of the games industry in the UK, clearly we have a very strong interest in making sure tax credits happen to keep production in the UK. That’s why it’s such an important issue for us.

But one thing about tax break proposal is that it would help a whole range of different companies in the UK. Our proposal would help any company with a budget for a game over £100,000. It would help any company that passes the cultural test  – you have to pass the cultural test to benefit from any tax breaks.

A huge proportion of those companies would benefit. Our tax break proposal would also help companies that were making a loss in a particular year, rather like the Research and Development tax credits. I understand there are some companies who will say, “oh, we’re pre-profit so it’s not going to help us”, but that’s just not true. Providing you pass the cultural test and providing the budget for your game is at least £100,000, even if you’re making a loss, a tax break will still help you financially and you’ll get money from the government.

So in fact, our proposal will help a whole range of companies: All the way from quite small production budgets to multi-million pounds ones. So it’s really important that companies in the UK, indigenous publishers and indigenous-owned development companies, back the campaign. We’ve made a huge amount of progress; we’ve had a set-back in June of last year with the government dropping the pledge to introduce tax breaks for games production. But we haven’t gone away and we’re going to carry on campaigning for it.

NZ: You mentioned countries such as Canada and other overseas development areas. How much a threat do you think there is on the workforce; the “brain drain”, where UK employees can be sapped away and offered more lucrative deals for working in foreign countries.

RW: I think it’s a major threat and we have a lot of evidence to prove that. We have a lot of anecdotal evidence, whenever I visit a studio in the UK I’m continually told how they’ve lost staff to other jurisdictions and particularly they’ve gone off to Canada.

We also have survey evidence to show this as well. We did a survey of game developers right at the end of 2009 and that showed that 23% of the companies who we interviewed had lost staff over the last 12 months. Almost a quarter of development studios had lost staff over the 12 month period. Of that 23% of companies losing staff, 75% said staff had gone to Canada.

The third point that’s worth mentioning is that when we you go to trade shows; Develop in Brighton, for example, the Canadians are there. You go to Gamescom, the Canadians are there encouraging companies to invest overseas or indeed encouraging people to relocate. And I have to say, these Canadian people are charming. They’re very nice people, but obviously we are in a competitive battle with them. Those three examples are really pertinent – it just shows that there’s anecdotal evidence that shows people going overseas to Canada, our survey evidence confirms that and thirdly, you just have to have your eyes open and go to these trade shows and see them there. So it’s a major threat.

Just one more point on how likely or successful or tax breaks are going to be. It’s worth bearing in mind that it’s still official Labour Party policy, it’s still official Scottish National Party policy and there are Conservative MPs who support it. John Wickendale, for example, he’s the chairman of the all-party group on the videogames industry. He continues to think that it’s a sensible option and there are other MPs who are sympathetic as well. Whilst you’ve always got thing such as the film tax credit or other set specific measure to help other industries, that always means we’ve got a very strong argument to make for the videogames industry.

The second thing I’d say as well is that politicians are continually changing their minds. The last thing you would ever describe a politician as is being consistent. They do change their minds readily and if you can make a strong case and put a convincing argument in front of them then you’ve got every chance of succeeding. But I really think it’s important that the whole industry gets behind this measure and I believe we can get it, and I do believe TIGA can get games tax breaks for the whole games industry, but clearly it will help if organisations like EA will back us too.

We’ve made a public campaign and we’ve continued and we continue to argue for it and it helps that campaign if EA can be consistent and support tax breaks. It’s our top priority and I think it’s the games industry’s top priority and so I think it’s really important we don’t send out a mixed-message and say “oh, it’s not that important really and can quite understand why the government isn’t going to do it”. That’s not helpful.

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Milkstone Studios are a small team of Spanish developers intent on “making fun games whilst having fun doing them”. With three titles under their belts, I caught up with their head programmer Alejandro González Fiel shortly after lavishing their most recent title MotorHEAT with praise to find out a little about their development process and their newest title Avatar Ninja.

Nukezilla: OK, firstly, could you tell us a little bit about your team and studio setup?

Alejandro González Fiel: Milkstone is mainly formed by two people: Miguel Herrero, and me.

We work from home and don’t have much time to spend, since we’re doing this on our hobby time. Although both of us are programmers, he usually does most non-coding related tasks (graphics, SFX, music’¦) and I do the coding part.

We’ve also received help from our friends at some points, such as in Wool‘s level design and beta testing.

NZ: How do you find inspiration for your games?

AGF: Both Miguel Herrero and me are pretty experienced gamers, with a passion for playing both good and bad games. We mantain a list of ideas that could be converted into games and write them each time an idea comes to our mind. When the time to select a new idea comes, we look at the list and select the one we think that’s the best, given the time and resources available.

NZ: How long does an average game’s development take?

AGF: We’re focusing on short development cycles to ensure games are finished (it’s hard to work during hobby time if you get bored). Most of our games have taken around 3 months of development.

NZ: The graphics engine utilised by MotorHEAT was a massive step up from both earlier releases – what encouraged you to make the leap from 2D to 3D?

AGF: Our main objective with MotorHEAT was to release a game with really high quality 3D graphics, since most of games on the Indie Games channel are rather simple.

We’re already very experienced with 3D graphics in our main jobs, and the only reason we didn’t do it before is due to the lack of modellers. The engine we developed is very focused on 3D: the first game that used it, never released on Indie Games, was a 3D spaceship game.

NZ: Alongside releases like Decimation X, MotorHEAT seems to be championing the Indie Games channel as a hotbed for somewhat of an arcade renaissance. Do you think that the channel has genuine potential to house the type of simple, addictive games that both the Live Arcade and retail largely ignore?

AGF: For sure. As in every other marketplace, the amount of truly innovative games on the Indie channel is low. Most of them are remakes or are inspired by already invented gameplay (ours aren’t an exception).

Since the games’ size (in terms of variety and length) should be limited (due to relatively low sales numbers), I think Indie games should focus on simple and polished gameplay, with high production levels.

NZ: Your disappointment surrounding the sales of both Wool and MotorHEAT has been openly expressed on your website. Do you feel that the low sales of both titles is because of marketing problems on either Milkstone’s or Microsoft’s part, or is it something deeper within the setup of the Indie Games channel?

AGF: Wool was our mistake, we won’t blame anyone other than us for that. People just don’t like sheep herding games! We’ve recently posted a Postmortem on our site with our conclusions about the development process and the game.

MotorHEAT is another story. We think the game really is good enough, gameplay wise, to stand among the top Indie games. We’ve done our best to market the game, but mostly to no avail. It’s hard to tell people on a website (or any other media) ‘œThis game is great! turn on your console, go here, then here, then here, and try the demo!’

I’d say it’s in part Microsoft’s fault, but not for not marketing enough the channel. The main problem is the dashboard itself: It’s just not equipped to browse between almost a thousand different games. As with Apple’s App Store, it’s very top-centric. If you’re on the top 20, you’ll sell a lot. If you’re not, you’re doomed. Our game is rated #43 on the channel, but we only get 15 trial downloads a day.

Some things that I think would improve Marketplace usability are: A ‘œtop grossing’ list, to help games that are not just 80MP to have a chance (since all other lists are just ordered by download numbers), a search function, related games and recommendation system, more items in the top charts, a random picks list’¦

Really, there’s a lot of work to be done here, and in my opinion the console with the best marketplace will be the one that will win the war for the next generation.

NZ: You ran a competition to celebrate the release of MotorHEAT with a slew of MS Point prizes, is this something that you’d consider again for future titles?

AGF: Not in the short term. Problem is, we’re not big enough to be heard when we shout that there’s a competition with lots of prizes to be given, so it’s unlikely to get enough people to try the game to justify the investment in prizes etc.

NZ: Could you tell us anything about the newly released Avatar Ninja?

AGF: It’s a reaction game with simple gameplay and good graphics, but increasingly challenging and with world rankings – a bit like MotorHEAT but with different gameplay. It’s not better though.

NZ: With the Indie Games channel becoming somewhat of a dumping ground for Avatar themed titles, what will Avatar Ninja do to separate itself from the crowd?

AGF: There are two ways in which Avatar Ninja shines over most Avatar themed games: graphical quality and production levels. It’s our fourth game and we’ve learned how to do clean and pretty user interfaces, and we make good use of particle systems and lighting to improve overall graphics’ quality.

Gameplay could be better. We went with a control scheme that was maybe too difficult to improve with more gameplay elements, but it should be challenging and could get you addicted anyway.

NZ: Your persistent online ranking system implemented in both Wool and MotorHEAT is extremely impressive – is it code that you keep close to your chest, or is it something which you’d be happy for other developers to use?

AGF: Our P2P score system is just a heavily modified version of the one available here. We redid the design from scratch, but kept the connection logic etc, so that it would fit our needs (more flexibility to add different levels, checksums, etc.).

We don’t have any problem in sharing the modified version with other people if someone asks for it. It’s just that we don’t have much spare time and it’s not very well documented. That’s the reason we’ve not posted this and some other components on our website.

What we don’t plan on publishing anytime soon is the whole game engine. It would require too much time and effort to document it, make tutorials, give support, etc.

NZ: Any other games in the pipeline that you could tell us about?

AGF: Our next game will be probably another avatar game designed for multiplayer and party games. Following that, we have more original games in mind, but they’ll take longer so it will depend on how sales go.

NZ: Thanks for taking the time to talk to us, and we wish you every success in the future.

Milkstone are the creators of Little Racers, Wool, MotorHEAT and the newly released Avatar Ninja.

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I’d venture to say Dwarf Fortress is the most rich, complex game I’ve ever played. The game uses a modified ASCII character set for graphics, and yet it works my computer harder than Bad Company 2. The game’s main objective is simply to survive, and yet there are pages upon pages of documentation for the best methods of doing so. Dwarf Fortress was released in 2006, and has become a huge hit among PC gamers. Even if you’ve never played Dwarf Fortress before, you may have heard of the famous “Boatmurdered” game, where several players took turns playing the same fortress (I recommend you read their stories, it’s absolutely hilarious).

Dwarf Fortress has an extremely advanced system of variables; Dwarves have likes and dislikes, personalities and desires. The environment has an advanced physics engine, complete with its own fluid dynamics model.  Unlucky miners can cause cave-ins or accidentally exposes a magma flow.

The entire game was the brainchild of two brothers, Tarn and Zach Adams, and is currently being developed by Tarn. It’s obvious Tarn has worked extremely hard on developing the game, and just released a massive patch a few days ago. Wanting to find out more about Dwarf Fortress and its progress, I decided to contact Tarn for an interview, who was more than willing to talk with us.

Negative Gamer: Thanks again for doing the interview Tarn. For readers who have never heard of Dwarf Fortress, how would you describe the game?

Tarn Adams: It’s a PC game that aspires to be a fantasy world simulator. In its current state, you can control a colony of dwarves in a reasonably robust game as they go about their lives and mine down into the earth,or you can play the unfinished adventure mode that lets you control a single character through their fairly violent and short existence. It relies on a text display in the manner of rogue likes to get information across, but as with many roguelikes, there are 2D tilesets available (on the wiki).

One of Several Fan-made Tilesets

NG: A massive update, version 0.31.01, was recently released, and has a staggering amount of new features and changes. Some additions are amazing, such as weight affecting Dwarves resistance to cold. Where do you get the inspiration for some of these changes? Are the majority of them community requests?

TA: We (when I say we, that’s my brother and I — he co-designed the game) drew our inspiration for the game itself from many places, but when it comes to the recent specific changes, a lot of that came out of adding the tissue system in the first place. That was something we’d always wanted to do, to improve combat and to open up these kind of possibilities (see the earlier failed attempt at bay12games.com/armok for some really strange experiences in tissue modeling), and once you’ve got such a thing written up it just has a lot of potential interaction with the systems already in place, and you try to catch as many connections as possible. We already had inventory insulation for example and a fake insulation number for each creature, and tissue insulation was natural from there. I wouldn’t say the community is responsible for suggesting the majority of the changes, but players certainly suggested many things that made it into the game and the game is better for it.

NG: You’ve made absolutely amazing progress on the game as a one-man team. Have you ever considered a larger team to help development, or do you prefer working by yourself on DF?

TA: There are some people helping out, especially with technical stuff that it would take me a long time to learn and program on my own (and with the rest of the game on hold on top of that). I prefer working by myself overall, and I don’t anticipate opening up much of the game itself to a larger team, aside from what is going in the raw data files which anybody can mess around with.

The Biome Generator is extremely advanced

NG: Are you happy with the direction Dwarf Fortress has taken? Where do you see the game in five years?

TA: Yeah, where my previous projects have failed or otherwise lost steam, Dwarf Fortress is still chugging along, and that is cool. It has only been out on the internet for three and a half years, and in development on and off for eight, so five years is pretty major…well, it should be crazy by then. I hope it won’t be any less playable, he he he.

NG: A larger portion of our readers are console players, and I’m sure they would love to know if you ever plan on a trimmed down console version of the game?

TA: It’s hard to commit to something like that, since I’m mostly interested in adding to the game. I also don’t know how unfinished/version-heavy games work on consoles these days. We haven’t connected our XBox to the internet… I guess there are all sorts of things there. If consoles these days can handle the game and somebody were to port it and it were easy to distribute, I’d consider it, but a trimmed-down game probably isn’t going to happen.

Dwarves hard at work

NG: It seems like so many games are abandoning key immersion and gameplay features in favor of a flashy, Hollywood style of presentation. Dwarf Fortress is exactly the opposite, forgoing the showy graphics in favor of immersion and detail that is almost unheard of in a game. Do you feel like developers are assuming the lowest common denominator in development, choosing explosive snowmobile races instead of quality gameplay?

TA: There are a lot of developers out there. Among the major games you see TV commercials for and so on, well, I guess you could say that they are aiming for a large audience by necessity, but even then, I had fun with, say, Red Faction: Guerilla, and I think it had TV commercials. Maybe it was lowest common denominator fun, but I didn’t mind, and they had a better “cave-in” model than DF ever will. At the same time, when it comes to other kinds of details, then, yeah, DF is pretty far out there, and I don’t expect to see a lot of what I’m doing in a large commercial project any time soon, and I think DF fulfills a need for some players that the giant developers aren’t interested in fulfilling. My brother and I continue writing games in part because the games we most want to play aren’t being created by anybody, large or small, so in that way I’d say developers are ignoring quality gameplay, but that’s down to personal taste, he he he. It could be that way for everybody. All of our dream games are slightly different. That’s part of what allows independents to co-exist with the major studios and still survive.

NG: Are there plans for a multiplayer version of Dwarf Fortress in the future? If so, what type of gameplay would it entail?

TA: I don’t really have much multiplayer blood in me. I can’t say it would never happen, but I don’t think it’s likely, at least beyond what’s already happening — there are DF succession games and so on. People have brought up ideas like being able to send an army off-screen and having it saved to the disk to send to your friend or something, and ideas along those lines could happen at some point, maybe, but it isn’t a focus. Maybe something with the new arena mode? I don’t know.

Third-party programs can render your fortress in a 3-D top-down view

NG: Dwarf Fortress is a perfect example of an indie developer seeing huge success on the PC. Do you feel that the PC is still a great platform for indie developers to meet with success, or are mobile platforms like the iPhone, Android, and now the iPad the new platform of choice for devs?

TA: I don’t know the first thing about how successful games on mobiles are, by any measure. I know independents have done very well on the consoles, especially since there are specific distribution methods there for them, but there are people that have found success on the PC as well, and it’s certainly easier to get started now that everybody is on the internet. If somebody is writing games to write games, they should go with the platform that lets them best realize their vision. The PC is a natural fit for Dwarf Fortress, but for another game it might be a console or a hand held or something mobile or whatever.

NG: Dwarf Fortress is a rare gem in that it supports Windows, Mac, and Linux. Do you find that developing for Mac and Linux, both of which hold much smaller market shares than Windows, worth the effort? Do you feel like there is untapped potential in the Mac and Linux market for devs?

TA: Fortunately, a few people have helped me with that, so my view might be skewed here, but I think it’s definitely worth it. There’s untapped potential, though emulation has gotten to the point that Mac and Linux people aren’t generally shut out even if a game is Windows-only, so it’s not like a dam waiting to burst. Mac and Linux people appreciate native support though.

NG: And lastly, what advice would you give potential indie developers from your own experiences?

TA: For people that really want to make computer games, well, hopefully they have already begun writing them, and if not, they should get started! If you have no experience finishing a project, start small, perhaps with one of the many game-making utilities that’s available these days if you have no programming experience. Once you’ve finished some small projects, you’ll develop a feel for some of the skills that are needed, and what it’s like to make a game in general. Get on the web sooner rather than later and show people some of what you are doing. There will be people that share your tastes and they will help you, and they’ll get the word around once you’ve got something playable.

Most importantly, work a lot. Plan games. Code all the time or draw all the time if that’s the part you want to focus on. You have to make concessions to your real-life situation, but the time you put in will show.

This is what has worked for me so far. Any independent developer will probably have something different or contradictory to say, because there are many ways that a project can come to fruition. In that regard, you’ll have to make choices all the time that don’t even relate to the content of the game (open source or not? sales or donations or something else? platform? team or solo?), and those choices rarely ever have simple answers that work for every project or even for the same project over its lifetime. So keep a flexible attitude and discuss these choices with people when they come up, but trust your judgment in the end as to what will keep your project afloat.

There you have it readers, an interview with one of the most influential independent PC developers to date. If you want to download Dwarf Fortress or find out more about the game, go to http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/

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Wex had a sit down chat with Nathan Fouts, president of Mommy’s Best Games last weekend. Mommy’s Best Games make games, good games; like Weapon of Choice and Shoot 1UP (which is only 80 MS Points).

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One of the coolest stalls at PAX East (at least in my opinion) was the one for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. The Game Lab brings students from MIT and 40 of the best students from Singapore together to make some very cool games. They also work with a lot of the smaller indie game makers in the local area to, in their own words, “become a hub for the Boston indie gaming community”.

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Over the weekend quite a few of us were at PAX East checking out all the great games being played (check out our PAX East podcast for more). One that I was most looking forward to getting my hands on was Devil’s Tuning Fork. We had a chat to Jason Pecho, one of the guys behind the game, to find out more.

To play the game for yourself, or to find out more, head over to the Devil’s Tuning Fork official site.

If you’re interested in seeing more indie game coverage from PAX East, we also had a chat with the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab.

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What goes in to making an Indie Game when you start with nothing? Earlier this month Jon reviewed the Xbox Live Indie game Herman. The game got a generally positive review and I contacted the game’s creator, Todd Snarl, to let him know. We had something of a chat about the game and Snarl made mention that he has “retired from the game business”.

Curious to know why and to find out more about the process behind one of the most interesting indie games on the XBLIG service, Snarl kindly agreed to an interview, his last formal addition to the gaming world.

Negative Gamer: For those who’ve never heard of you, could you give a bit of background on yourself?

Todd Snarl: I had a mostly normal childhood. Fifteen minutes after my last final at Ohio State, I hit the road to Los Angeles. My accounting degree has never come into play in life, thankfully. I was signed to BMG Music Publishing in ’99…I thought I was going to continue Cobain’s work, but recording over a hundred songs and scoring some short films by myself in my living room didn’t get me over the hump. All the music in Herman came from this period.

I lucked into the grip union in ’97, and have worked off and on over the last thirteen years on some great movies and TV shows…Team America, Terminator 3, Spider-Man, four years on The Office…all kinds of pretty quality stuff. And lastly, I was a huge internet seller of Transformers robot toys for a decade.

Nothing in my life, pre-2009 had anything to do with making a video game, aside from the fact that I have passionately loved and played video games off and on since the Atari 2600 and Apple IIe. I still have my Apple IIe, along with my floppy of 150 self-created Lode Runner levels. So my homage to Lode Runner comes from a very genuine love for it. I have around ten working video game systems in my house right now, from NES to PS3. No Wii, though…I’m into not flailing my arms around.

NG: What lead you to want to want to make games and why did you choose Xbox Live as your platform?

TS: I read about XNA a couple years back and made a note to check it out someday. When I finally did, I was excited to find out it was free. I never made the choice…a day later, with basically no programming experience and not much in Photoshop, either, I lucked into creating Herman and had him rotating left and right on my computer screen via a tutorial program. What a thrill! My girlfriend got that on video…that was a great moment in my life. No way did I ever think it was possible that I could make much of a video game, but one thing led to another, and before I knew it, I was swimming like a maniac. From that point, I became passionate and crazed, often working 12+ hours a day, for months on end.

I also never chose the 360. I just started working on doing something on my computer (aka for Windows), and Herman was a Windows game until it was 85% done…although the idea to convert it had been in place for months by then. Originally, Herman was bigger and ran around on more of a 3D office space with cubicles and water coolers…but I had crazy problems and eventually chose to redesign it.

The day I swapped it to the 360…and it really only took one day, that was another great moment. I have a video of the first time Herman came up on my TV. All I could think was: wow…I have made a video game that is running on the Xbox 360! It still practically gives me chills to think about that moment.

To this day, I am blown away by how well XNA works…I put Herman on a wireless laptop, and the next thing you know, it’s running through the 360. Getting it to run on the 360 was almost as smooth as clicking a couple buttons. Of course, I had to reprogram all the input controls and other stuff for the 360, and that took a week, but I’m just talking about what a solid system XNA seems to be. Go Microsoft.

NG: How many games have you created, and why did you make each of them?

TS: Herman was my first game ever, and then I spent a week making “Four Player Tangerine Fight,” which is just a 2-4 player arena battle version of Herman with no single player. I made Herman because I realized I could…and I made Tangerine Fight because, why not? The basic structure was already there, and it seemed like a fun idea. For only a week of work, compared to 1000 hours for Herman, Tangerine Fight was a steal.

NG: With Herman being a fairly non-typical game, how did you approach the ideas in it and how were they received?

You say it’s non-typical, but I really had no clue at the time. I was shocked when it released, by the reactions everyone had. Here I was, I thought I had made this totally sweet game that was going to blow everyone away. To me, it was like a playing a cartoon, with a killer story and totally bitchin’ music, and I thought it was fun as hell. I send it to reviewers, and some people acted like I had sent them a turd on a plate. Amazing.

To be fair, most people really liked certain elements of the game at least…the Braid homage, the music, the backgrounds. But there were a lot of people who just wanted to hate the game right out of the gate, and I think a lot of this comes down to the game being abnormal. Also, I totally muffed the press release, I realize in hindsight…I made a press release tailored for big sites like Gamespot, in which the game was really talked up. I should not have sent this to small sites, as I think it came off as pompous.

On my trial level…which I also totally screwed up…at the end, a screen comes up with some options. One option is “Press X if you wish the game were cheaper.” If you press X, different voices say things like “come on, man,” “can you really put a price on your entertainment needs,” “you won’t be sorry,” “do it!,” etc. To this day, this stuff still makes me laugh out loud…I think it’s a riot. But it was yet another thing that at least one reviewer crucified me for. This one humorless and very angry reviewer was convinced I was the most arrogant jerk who had ever made a video game…he was insulted to the core and rated my game a 0 out of 10.

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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.

– — –

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

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[Editor's note: Dan's been getting his hands on all the cool toys at GDC this week. Earlier today he chatted to Josh Bays, Product Evangelist for Sixense and Scott Szyjewicz who is the Manager of their support group to talk about their PC TrueMotion controller]

Negative Gamer: Ok, so give me a rundown on this.

Josh Bays: So this is the Sixense TrueMotion dev kit. This is a wireless, magnetic tracking system motion controller. It is a magnetic base, plugged into the computer via USB, power and data. Generates a magnetic field six feet out, a twelve foot sphere, or ‘œplay area’. Anywhere within that area is where you’re going to get high fidelity, precise, motion controls.

So you can see on screen my movements of my hands on the controller are going to be reflected very precisely in the game. So my hand is now holding the crow-bar, instead of the Sixense controller. If I tilt it a little bit, or move it a little bit it’ll be reflected, it’s 1mm of position position precision and one degree of orientation.

NG: Would that be enough, say for instance, enable different kinds of pitches in a baseball game?

JB: Absolutely. It’s definitely a lot more high fidelity, a lot more precise than any consumer motion controllers.

NG: Not knowing what 1 mm equates to, what kind of translation into the average consumer terms, just how precise is it?

JB: It’s precise enough that game developers are going to be knowing exactly what you are going to be doing with your controller rather than guessing what it is based on acceleration. So because it’s not using accelerometers, it’s not using IR, it doesn’t use gyros, there’s no line of sight required, I can move around my back here and hit zombies around the corner. It’s lower latency; we have it down to around 15 milliseconds depending on some conditions. Your monitor will make a difference, but it’s going to be fast response time and it’s going to know exactly what you’re doing so there’ not going to be any waggle gaming with this controller, it’s true motion.

NG: Now that 15 millisecond latency, is that something that by release is going to be faster/tighter or is it like a hard physics based limit?

JB: It’s not inherent to the system, the magnetic field is travelling at the speed of light, right? So there’s no reason it can’t be a little bit lower than that. A lot of the latency comes from our RF link between the controllers and the base.

We’re thrilled to be working with Razer to develop the consumer version of this same tech. So their legendary RF that’s given them the Imba, the wireless mouse with the one millisecond pulling time, that’s going to make a difference and that’s going to hopefully cut it down.

NG: So this kit your using right now isn’t a Razer kit, it’s a developer kit?

JB: Yeah, this is the dev kit. It was made in-house and designed in-house. We think it’s perfectly adequate for the purpose of development, it works for gaming. But the Razer end product will look different and be performing hopefully better.

NG: So we talked earlier about this being a PC exclusive. Can you go into a bit more detail as to why?

JB: Razer is very comfortable in the PC space. They are just now moving into consoles with their headsets and their custom 360 controllers, so Razer is most comfortable there and it’s also an open platform. It’s USB so theoretically we could see it on the 360 and the PS3, but those are closed systems were we don’t know what the people at Sony and Microsoft are going to allow on there.

NG: So it’s not closed out, you just haven’t gotten to that point yet.

JB: I mean, we want it everywhere, we want it to be completely ubiquitous so we will take it wherever it’s allowed to go.

NG: The technology behind this is 100% proprietary? It’s all you guys?

JB: Yes. That’s true.

NG: How long as this been in development for?

JB: Sixense as a company has existed for about three years. So it’s been being developed that whole time.

NG: And is this the first product for Sixense?

JB: The TrueMotion system is our first product. We’re doing motion capture with the same tech and we’ve gone though many versions of our dev kit, but TrueMotion is what were working on right now.

[Editor's note: At this point Dan got to see some demonstration software showing what the Sixense controller is capable of. As you might expect this doesn't transcribe that well, so we'll let Dan better explain it when he gets the time. For now we'll pick up the interview a few minutes later on the topic of in-game uses]

NG: Possible support for MMOs? What’s the direction you guys are looking at with that? Obviously it looks like it’s geared mostly towards first person shooters or a little bit of RTS stuff as well, but have you thought about the MMO market?

Scott Szyjewicz: We’ve considered it. It’s hard to competed with a keyboard in an MMO sense because there’s so many binds. We can do a lot of gesture type stuff, but it’s hard to emulate a hundred keys. I don’t know if you know League of Legends by Riot Games? That’s like a basic MMO type game and we actually have support for that right now. We’re definitely working towards it, but for now we’re focused on FPS’ and RTS’.

NG: Gesture support is the route you would probably end up going with that?

SS: Yeah, we don’t have that many buttons. The consumer product might have more buttons but it’s not going to have that many ‘“ it’s got going to have as many as a keyboard.

NG: In the video I was watching earlier with Left 4 Dead, and obviously this is more geared towards first person shooters, but it had the ability to throw grenades in off directions, compared to where you’re looking. Now how is that going to work with games? Because I don’t think you can do that with a mouse and keyboard, so is there some sort of competitive advantage or having this interface?

SS: Definitely. We’ve been thinking about Modern Warfare 2. One of the things with that is that a lot of times when you’re throwing grenades you end up looking at the sky. Then some guy runs straight up in your face and you never even see him because you’re looking at the sky, because you’re trying to throw a grenade really far.

So we have it so you can actually throw at different heights, you can lob something really softly, you can just rocket it in there if you want. We were thinking what would be cool is if you hand your gun in your right hand ‘“ because now you have to switch away from your gun to get your grenade ‘“ you can just run by a door, flip a grenade in with your left hand. You never even have to look in the door. If you know somebody went in there you can just run by and flip a grenade. It takes half a second, rather than a five second thing where you are disarmed for part of the time.

NG: Have you gotten any negative pressure from the developers on these games who are thinking ‘œwe’re giving one set of users a competitive advantage by giving them in-game abilities that the other player’s don’t have’?

SS: The game developers have to change their engine to support it, so that takes them a little bit of time. But they’re generally pretty supportive of it because they know that how grenade throwing works now is not very realistic and it kind of breaks the realism in their games (which they are trying to make more realistic generally). Also, it can cause balancing issues, but with those guys that’s what they do; they do balancing, so they’ll figure it out.

NG: Thank you very much for your time, we appreciate it.

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Battle of the Immortals is a new, free-to-play MMO from Perfect Worlds (who published site favourite Torchlight) due to enter into closed-Beta testing in a couple of months. The game is already out in China and is undergoing some serious westernisation to get it geared up for the North American audience.

Taking Norse and Chinese mythology to drive its story and with a strong focus on equipment and player v player combat, the game is making a lot of people rather curious. We caught up with the game’s Product Manager, Jon Belliss, for more information.

Negative Gamer: Hi Jon, firstly thanks very much for taking the time to chat with us.

Could you tell to us a bit about your role as the Battle of the Immortals‘ Product Manager? Where is the game being developed and how many people are working on it?

Jon Belliss: Sure thing. As Product Manager for Battle of the Immortals, I am responsible for anything related to the North American version of Battle of the Immortals. Whether that is coordinating with the development team or internal departments here in North America, if it touches Battle of the Immortals, I’m involved. Battle of the Immortals is from our Shanghai studio where we have hundreds of talented individuals working on the game.

NG: As the publisher of one of Negative Gamer‘s favourite games from last year, Torchlight, is there anything Perfect World Entertainment has learned from that game that’s helping with the development of BoI? Is there anything you’re learning from making the BoI MMO that will go into the Torchlight MMO?

JB: Battle of the Immortals actually came out in China a long time before Torchlight came out here, but fans of Torchlight will be familiar with the isometric viewpoint. I’m a big fan of Torchlight and if you’re a fan of adventure RPGs, you’ll really enjoy Battle of the Immortals. With every successive title we release here in the US, we gain more and more perspective not only on the Free to Play industry, but on North American PC gamers. You can be sure that everything we learn, we take with us into our future titles. I’m 100% sure that BoI will have some relevant data and information for when we publish the Torchlight MMO.

NG: Something that’s always a concern to PC gamers is the specs needed to run games. Is there a target minimum computer spec you’re working towards? Will it be playable on netbooks, for example?

JB: We are always designing our games to be very scalable, which means that they look great on a gaming rig, while still looking nice and running smoothly lower spec PCs. Most of our games do run on netbooks, which makes them very accessible to everyone with a computer and an Internet connection. Each game’s minimum specs are located on its game page.

NG: Is the game a plot driven MMO or more of a player combat driven game? In other words; where do you expect players to spend most of their time, battling instances or each other?

JB: There is an adventure aspect and something unique to Battle of the Immortals that players will see unfolds in chapters. Once players hit level 31, the game gets very PvP-oriented, where you’ll have to battle other players for the best loot and in some cases, even to take down bosses.

NG: What do you think most differentiates BoI from the large number of other MMOs on the market?

JB: The coolest thing that I think that differentiates Battle of the Immortals from other MMOs is the gear. Every gear set meticulously detailed and in many cases animated, which I think a lot of people will geek out about. On top of that, Soul Gear, which is the best gear one can obtain, will be very customizable and will grow and level with the player.

NG: The notion of boss battles where multiple groups compete for the spoils (something you’ve described as PvPvE in the past) sounds like fun, but how do you balance that? How to the weaker teams remain successful?

JB: Without a doubt, Battle of the Immortals is pretty hardcore and so it’s pretty unforgiving for noobs. A tip to weaker teams: team up with another guild! Once you’re a part of a bigger guild, you’ll be able to participate in the Territory War System, which will give you access to rarer loot, resources and treasure. With this you will become much more powerful and thus be able to become a much stronger team. Naturally, we’ll be watching the behavior of our players during Closed Beta and readjusting content where needed in order to ensure that everyone has a good time with BoI.

NG: How did the story behind the game come about? A combination of Norse and Chinese mythology doesn’t seem like one of the more obvious pairings.

JB: It’s not obvious, but when you think about great mythology, how can you not compare the two? The story has a huge push around visiting lost civilization and uncovering mythological treasure. What other game will allow you to visit the great Egyptian Pyramids, discover the lost city of Atlantis or uncover the mysteries behind Easter Island? Except maybe, ‘œWhere in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?‘

NG: I have to ask, why pick a logo so similar to the grand-daddy of MMOs, World of Warcraft? Or is it simply co-incidence?

JB: Our logo is based off of the original Chinese logo for Battle of the Immortals. The original logo from China has a darker color scheme. We wanted to go with gold and blue as our primary colors for both the site as well as the logo. (Mostly because it fit with some of the concept backgrounds that we had.) It just so happened that the final product ended up having a strong resemblance to ‘œgrandpa’. In short, simply co-incidence.

NG: How different are the localised versions of the game from each other and do you think these difference could cause some gamers to raise complaints?

JB: When we localize a game, not only do we make sure that the text is translated correctly, but we also need to make sure that the gaming style fits, since each market is different. The way Asia might play MMOs is very different than what North Americans expect. A great example of this is the push back from gamers about the level of grind found in Aion, while Korean players are used to that in their MMOs.

The version that’s currently being published in China would definitely fall on deaf ears if directly ported to the US. It’s for that very reason that we’re paying specific attention to localizing the gameplay for BoI. This is a long and complex process that requires diligent attention to the root game design, while also knowing what works and what doesn’t in the US free-to-play market.

NG: How will gamers be paying for the game? Will monthly subscription options be available or will gamers be buying gear and gold?

JB: As with all of our games, Battle of the Immortals will be free-to-play. Unlike the monthly subscription model, players only need to open their wallets if they decide to purchase items from the cash shop. We like to think of it as you pay AFTER you’ve decided you like the game, not before. We also make a point to NOT let players buy the best items, weapons or equipment, to make it fair to all of our players.

NG: What’s the current time line looking like as far as the beta and eventual launch go, and once the game launches how many players would you be happy to see playing?

JB: We recently pushed out the closed beta for Battle of the Immortals to mid-April, so that we would be able to meet both players’ and our high gaming standards and you can read more about what we are working on at the official Perfect World blog here: http://www.perfectworld.com/blog/?p=8701

Once we kick Battle of the Immortals off, I would love to see as many players as possible in the game. I even challenge players as well as your readers to overload the servers! For us, we can only deliver the best game possible, but it’s the players that make it the best experience possible!

I consider myself very lucky to be working on a title that has such a receptive design team. Combining player feedback, with the knowledge base here at PWE, with the agile development team in Shanghai, I’m sure that BoI will do very well in the US market.

NG: Thank you very much for your time, and good luck with the beta!

For the latest BoI news check out the official game page.

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We all have an opinion on it. Left 4 Dead 2 is coming out sooner than expected and some people aren’t too happy about it. The original game was said to come as “a service” rather than a game. Valve, the game’s makers, suggested regular updates were in the pipeline on par with those their other multiplayer game, Team Fortress 2, is enjoying. With the announcement of the game’s sequel, doubts have been raised over whether that content is still coming to the original game.

Fans were none too happy about the news and soon a Steam group titled L4D2 Boycott was formed, a group that passed the 20,000 members mark today. To get to the root of the issue and to get reactions to some of the criticisms aimed at the group, I spoke to one of the group’s admins, Mr.Pancakes.

NG: Who’s idea was the boycott and did you expect to see such a huge response (both positive and negative) from the gaming community as a whole? Why did you feel the need to organize yourselves into a group?

Walking_Target was the one who started the boycott at first. When it first started he created it for the purposes of giving people a place to vent their frustration about what was going on with the announcement of Left 4 Dead 2. As it progressed, we soon realized that it was much more than the few of us that had our reservations about the game. The people in our community needed their voices heard. That is when we decided to move things in more of a professional direction.

So far, I’d say the reaction has been mostly positive from gamers, and mostly neutral from big gaming sites. Sure we have people who have negative opinions of us, but we also have a large chunk of the community who agrees with what we’re doing. In fact, we get emails from people who disagree with our cause, but agree with the manner in which we’re going about fighting for it.

NG: With the limited information available regarding both L4D2 and the (supposed) on-going updates for L4D1, do you think it is fair to have reacted so early?

Absolutely. This is more about Left 4 Dead 1 than it is about Left 4 Dead 2 (although that is part of it). Left 4 Dead 1 was promised updates that should have been made by now. The SDK, which Valve has created only a beta version of thus far, was expected by the community within a few weeks after the release of the first Left 4 Dead. So far Valve has only made more promises to deliver on existing promises. Until those promises come through, we are, rightfully so, skeptical.

NG: Your steam group has now reached the 20,000 members mark, yet there is still a lot of anger aimed towards you. The biggest complaint I see is questioning why this matters. So, why do you care so much and why do you think other people care so much that you care so much?

I wouldn’t say there is a lot of anger aimed towards us. I’d say there is some anger aimed towards us, though.

We care about this because we like the quality of games Valve puts out and the standards they have set for supporting those games. They’re a great gaming company. To see Valve deviating from the model that we have enjoyed with other Valve titles, like Team Fortress 2, is concerning. It is a double standard which Valve is applying towards their other titles and we feel this standard has yet to be truly applied with Left 4 Dead 1.

NG: As your group has grown in notoriety, I’ve noticed you’ve updated your concerns to no longer reference the music, daytime setting or character designs as issues. Is this because somebody pointed out that the fat black guy looks like Uncle Phil from Fresh Prince of Bel Air?

He does kind of look like him, doesn’t he? I never personally realized that until now, but no that isn’t the reason.

We changed our manifesto because we wanted to keep it in line with what most people in the community had concerns about. The first manifesto was there from the beginning. It contained our gut reactions to the new game and why we disliked it. But as the community grew, people began to focus their concerns on the content issues with Left 4 Dead 1 and the timing of Left 4 Dead 2, more than the fiddle-music or the visual aspects of Left 4 Dead 2. It became more about Left 4 Dead 1, and many of our members wanted us to drop the complaints about the fiddle-music and the Left 4 Dead 2 aesthetic.

NG: Do you think the original L4D game (if all free DLC stopped now) was worth the price you paid for it?

I would say that some people within our community have said “no” to that question when it has come up, and feel that they bought Left 4 Dead 1 under the impression that it would have been supported in a more timely manner. Many of our members see Team Fortress 2, which was a $20 game, as far better supported than Left 4 Dead, which was a $50 game. The timing of Left 4 Dead 2 also has been a part, but not nearly the largest part, of why some people feel Left 4 Dead 1 may not have been worth purchasing.

NG: Has anyone from Valve spoken to you directly? If so, what was said?

We have talked with Valve staff, but very briefly. Nothing very substantial has been said to us from Valve. Although we did send them an email a few days back detailing some of our concerns, along with a copy of our new manifesto which was recently posted. We are still awaiting a reply from Valve.

NG: What compromises would you be happy to settle for and what (if any) compromises do you think Valve are likely to offer?

This is going to be an ongoing process in which we want to work with Valve. We would like to meet as many of our requests in our manifesto as possible. While I cannot say what Valve will offer, I do think Valve wants to make their community happy and will try to address these issues.

NG: Where do you see the group going, and what action do you see happening in the near future? What are your near-term goals and how will you reach them?

In the near future we hope to be actively talking with Valve representatives in trying to address these issues. What is going to make this successful for both us and Valve is good communication, and that is what we hope to establish in these next few weeks. That is our first goal.

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The topics Dr. Gentile covers, in my opinion, are among the most important issues modern gaming faces, and yet, probably the most overlooked by gamers themselves. What with them being energy drink-riddled husks of minuscule attention spans. BEES! Good, thought I had lost you there.

When asked about how addiction effects peoples’ lives, Gentile gave a quick run down of some of the symptoms that can be related to an addiction:

[Besides spending too much money] other symptoms include obsessively thinking about games, they can’t stop thinking about gaming and have a hard time concentrating in other areas of their life. They want to cut back, but aren’t able to – which shows a lack of control. When they do try to cut back, they feel restless and irritable ‘“ these are like withdrawal symptoms.

An “addiction” is generally characterized by a large number of varying symptoms that affect a person’s quality of life, rather than just one or two annoyances. Relating to the difference between gaming and just normal hobbies, Gentile explained;

Well, they don’t. What is different is how many symptoms you have. Anything you love to do you will sacrifice for. You will skip homework or chores, just because you love to do it. That’s fine, that’s normal. 1 or 2 symptoms, very normal. It’s when it’s so many that it adds up.

He also explained where gaming fits into the general scope of addictions. The DSM is basically the published methods of identifying mental disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association.

If this were included in the DSM where other addictions are defined, it would probably be included in the same place that pathological gambling is, which is as an impulse control disorder. You know you should do your homework, but you can’t keep yourself from playing the game.

Amusingly, when questioned about hate mail he receives due to angry gamers reading the reports on his research, r. Gentile replied,

I get hate mail all the time. I get hate mail from gamers who say violent games don’t affect me, I’ve played them all my life so I’m gonna come right over there and kill you. The games seem to damage some gamers’ sense of irony.

Regarding the ESA’s angry complaints against his research being published, Gentile explained they were just doing their job. A job which entails trying to show the research shouldn’t be taken seriously.

The ESA response was a way of trying to cast doubt on the whole study, because I calculated a confidence interval that we don’t really know what the theoretical sampling frame was to be able to know whether that’s the right number.

He goes on to say the ESA have a very interesting relationship with him and his work.

The ESA has threatened to sue me before. [laughs] If I say things negative about games, they threaten to sue, and yet they post some of my positive game studies on their web site. So they like it when I report ‘œgood’ studies, and not when I report on ‘œbad’ effects.

He then spoke about, in his opinion, where the problems within this area come from. And to an extend, I agree. Though I assume when he says “your site” he is referring to the video game blogs and news site as a whole.

That’s the funny thing, your site is part of the problem honestly, which is that people always reduce this to if it’s ‘œgood’ or ‘œbad.’ But that’s not what it’s about. The world is not black and white, or us versus them. Hopefully we’re smarter than that. The issue is that games have effects. In fact, games have really powerful effects and if they didn’t there wouldn’t be so many people who loved playing them.

He also criticises the ESA for their stance, or the stance of Doug Lowenstein in particular, on the research.

I’ve got clips of Doug Lowenstein (past-president of the ESA) saying ‘œEvery independent researcher, that is, every researcher who has come to this question without a preconceived idea that games are harmful has looked at the evidence and said there is absolutely no evidence that violent games have any harmful effects.’ I think I got his quote almost verbatim there.

What’s he saying? Every ‘œindependent researcher, that is every researcher that has come to this without preconceived notion.’ He’s claiming that any researcher who finds aggression affects is biased. Only researchers that he agrees with are ‘œindependent.’ He’s basically claiming that I make up my data. You know, there is no greater insult to a scientist. If I ever made up any of my data, I would get thrown out of the APA [American Psychological Association]. I would lose my job.

When talking about the media, he came up with a great analogy to how we should be treating violent video games, in relation to violent acts;

If you smoke, your risk of having a heart attack goes up. Did smoking cause your heart attack? No. Okay what’s another risk factor for a heart attack? Poor diet. Does that cause it? No. High cholesterol? No. If you ask the question what is the cause of the heart attack, there is no answer.

He also points out why video games are likely to become a target for this research, and it’s because although there are lots of factors which can lead to aggressive behaviour, we can control video games.

When you list the known risk factors for aggression in terms of size of the effect, media violence is not the biggest, but it’s also not the smallest. It’s right there in the middle of all the rest of them. So it’s one that should be taken as seriously as the others. What makes it different, however, is that it’s the one we can easily control. Poverty is also on the list, as is having been abused, but you can’t easily control those.

As I said at the start of this article, if you would like to know more (and their is much, much more), then do have a read of the full interview.

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[Dr. Douglas Gentile is a developmental psychologist, and is an assistant professor of Psychology at Iowa State University and the Director of Research for the National Institute on Media and the Family. His experience includes over 20 years conducting research with children and adults. He has published research on violent video games, on prosocial video games, on how video games may improve laparoscopic surgical skills, and most recently on video game "addiction." You can visit his site at www.drdouglas.org ]

Recently Doug Gentile published his most recent study, stating that 8.5% of American youth showed signs of addiction. It was picked up by a lot of major gaming sites, bringing along with it controversy among commenters.

You can read about the study here.

Dismissal of studies and research is common among gamers; fear of anything bad surrounding their hobby creates a defensive barrier denouncing all claims. This interview’s purpose is to better inform gamers about research, the “addiction” debate, and how researchers are not the evil antagonists that everyone makes them out to be.

NG: In gaming whenever there’s new research or data gamers become sheltered and the comments you see are often immature, which is one of the main reasons for this interview. Have you seen them?

Oh yeah, I’ve read all the comments about me. Apparently I don’t actually know anything, and they give out PhDs to anyone now. [laughs] I actually don’t read many of them.

NG: Where do you draw the line between using games as a hobby compared to an addiction?

I draw the line the same place the American Psychiatric Association draws the line between gambling as a hobby and gambling as an addiction. It’s when it damages enough areas of your life that you’re no longer keeping it in balance. That means demonstrating at least half of the symptoms. Is that the best way to define it? We don’t know for sure. But it’s a fair way, because for any addiction not everyone shows the identical symptoms.

For any disorder, such as depression, not everyone demonstrates the same pattern of symptoms. Out of the list of ten, this person could show this five, that person could show that 5. Does that mean they’re not both depressed? No, it is causing enough problems, but they way it’s manifesting for that person is somewhat different for this person. So it’s the same thing here, in the most recent study they had to show 6 out of 11 symptoms.

To get to 6 means they are damaging multiple areas of their lives. The average for boys was 2 symptoms, and the average for girls was 1. All disorders are normal behaviors taken to some extreme. It’s normal, anything you love to do, you do sacrifice other parts of your life. But, in this case you’re sacrificing so many other parts that it’s out of balance, and could have long term repercussions if you keep at it in that way. So it’s important to recognize at this level it’s a problem, I should probably get some help, pay attention and do something differently.

NG: You spoke about the addiction affecting “other” aspects of their life, could you expand on that?

We define it based on recognizing that your grades are suffering, that you’re skipping household chores – that of course damages your relationships with your parents. [laughs] You’re spending so much money that you need help from other people. I initially didn’t use that as a criterion, that’s straight out of gambling. You spend so much money that other people have to help you, it shows a kind of co-dependent behavior.

I thought that wasn’t happening with games, it seemed so extreme. In fact, one of the editors one of the addiction journals told me “No you need to put that in, because I’m seeing that in some of my cases!” So I put it in, and there are some people who are spending so much upgrading to the newest equipment or getting games so regularly. Other symptoms include obsessively thinking about games, they can’t stop thinking about gaming and have a hard time concentrating in other areas of their life. They want to cut back, but aren’t able to – which shows a lack of control. When they do try to cut back, they feel restless and irritable ‘“ these are like withdrawal symptoms.

So it’s a number of things, if they lie to other people or steal that damages their social relationships. Some of these are pretty extreme things. Not too many people do those extreme things, but some are. To have 6 of those symptoms it becomes clear that, wow, this matters for some people.

NG: Some video games are solely single player and story driven. Like books and movies, they end. How do you classify buying games with addiction?

Well I don’t. It’s not one of the symptoms, it would be a lack of validity if the kids who were classified as pathological didn’t buy more. They should, but it’s not a way we actually define it. So, no matter how many you’re buying that wouldn’t be a symptom that we would count.

See, it’s only ones that are damaging something else. Even how much they play isn’t a symptom. That’s not one of the things we ask. Once again, it would be a lack of validity if the pathological gamers weren’t playing more. Some people drink or gamble a whole lot, but aren’t addicted. So in fact that’s not the way the DSM [the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual which defines how to identify disorders] diagnoses any addiction. It’s never on how much, only when it damages other areas of your life. That’s when it becoming clinically relevant.

NG: In what way do these study symptoms differ from other hobbies and addictions?

Well, they don’t. What is different is how many symptoms you have. Anything you love to do you will sacrifice for. You will skip homework or chores, just because you love to do it. That’s fine, that’s normal. 1 or 2 symptoms, very normal. It’s when it’s so many that it adds up. If you’re constantly doing a number of these things, then there’s a problem. Skipping chores, not a big deal. Something like 50% of the sample, I forget off hand, say they do that or sometimes do that. Which mean it’s normal, but it’s not normal to do that and five more things.

No one symptom is the important one, and any one of them isn’t that big of a deal. But if you’re continually skipping your homework all the time, over time that’s going to have a cumulative effect. No one time matters. Skipping your homework once, doing poorly on one test? Not that big of a deal. But if you keep it up, then all your grades will suffer. If you continue not doing any of your chores, what’s your relationship with your parents going to be like? You’re going to get into more arguments with them, and lots of kids do report that they’re fighting with their parents over how they play games.

You can play a lot as long as you prioritize. So if you get your chores done, you get your homework done then you’re free. Go ahead play as much as you want. But for the kid that’s having problems it’s a different story. If this were included in the DSM where other addictions are defined, it would probably be included in the same place that pathological gambling is, which is as an impulse control disorder. You know you should do your homework, but you can’t keep yourself from playing the game. You know you shouldn’t lie about it, you know you should go to bed, but you have a hard time controlling that impulse to play.

In fact, that’s a hard thing for teenagers. The right prefrontal-temporal area of the brain is the impulse control area. It’s not finished developing until our mid-twenties. This explains teenage behavior. Why do teens do such crazy things? They don’t have the brakes, the brakes aren’t wired yet. What else do they have? They have the hormones ‘“ that’s like the gas. They’re high on gas, but no brakes. There you go, you now understand teenage behavior. [laughs] So impulse control is already is difficult for teens, just because that part of the brain isn’t fully developed yet.

Some people are better that it than others, but the people that are having problems with games aren’t good at setting their limits, they’re not good at prioritizing and making sure they get the things done first that they need to. So I’m assuming this is the type of problem it is. It’s not a substance. It’s not something you actually can become biologically addicted to. I don’t assume the solution would be to never play again ‘“ it’s probably not the same as Alcoholics Anonymous ‘“ where part of the solution is that you can’t ever drink again. That’s it, none ever for the rest of your life, because your body has a real reaction to it and you can’t keep your body from having that reaction.

I don’t think this is the same type thing. I’m not saying that the right way to treat this is no more games ever. Rather, the gaming has become unbalanced, you can’t control the impulse to game in a way that keeps it in balance with the rest of your life. So the rest of your life is suffering. I’m not a therapist so I’m not exactly sure how it would be done, [laughs] but I assume that treatment would be like other impulse control disorders.

First train the skill of recognizing – alright I want to play games now, is there something I should do first? We need to take the kids that are worse at controlling themselves and shift them into the better category. And it may not change how much they game all that much, it might just make sure that they’re prioritizing appropriately so that it’s now in balance.

NG: The ESA recently refuted against the study, claiming error. Do you ever get nasty emails, whether it be from gamers or big organizations?

Oh yeah, I get hate mail all the time. I get hate mail from gamers who say violent games don’t affect me, I’ve played them all my life so I’m gonna come right over there and kill you. The games seem to damage some gamers’ sense of irony. [laughs]

NG: How about Jack Thompson?

He doesn’t stick to the science, and makes all sorts of crazy claims. And he’s attacked me too for that matter.

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The world of the gaming enthusiast press is expanding at a staggering pace. Where there were just a handful of sites and blogs three or four years ago, now there are dozens starting up every day. We have sites covering our beloved gaming from every conceivable angle. This site right here being one of them.

Another such site is HipHopGamerShow.com, the home of Gerard Williams, aka The HipHopGamer. Blending the worlds of Hip Hop and gaming into a growing community of loyal fans, I don’t think anyone could doubt the unique style of The HipHopGamer.

NG: So, what is Hip Hop Gamer, and how did it all begin?

HipHopGamer is now a brand representing the urban side of videogaming. For many years when people talk about video games the first thing that comes to mind was little nerdy kids on there pc’s or consoles playing games and talking about geeky tech and electronics, but there’s a whole other community out there full of gamers from the hood that go hard at playing games as well so now that hiphopgamer is here and it’s real it brings a voice and change to what people label as a gamer now. It all began when I was only focusing on doing music but I really didn’t like the shady shit going on in the music industry, I always loved games my grandma (HipHopGranny) put me on to that so one day I was looking at DLB’s videos and they were interesting but then he stopped so I was like was up what’s going on, then I was watching Judge Mathis and he said find something that you love to do and get paid for it and that’s when it hit me. HipHop and Videogames both are my passions so let me put it together and make some money and create entertainment and now I’m doing a interviews with the great staff over at NegativeGamer.com

NG: How well does Hip Hop and gaming fit together?

HipHop and Gaming fit together perfectly because hiphop is a art form and a culture and gaming shares that same message. HipHop is very competitve just like you have game tournaments you have rap battles just like hiphop has slang gamers have slang Example in gaming people say “you got owned” or “your a noob” in hiphop people say “you wack” or “that’s gangsta” but it really fits together because hiphop is music and music is in games games have action and interactivity hiphop has action on stage and interactivity with the people so yes it’s a perfect match. HipHopGamer embodies the perfect combination of rap skillz and game knowledge for both industries to be represented together

NG: Where do you get your news and info about video games from?

I get my news from many sources, game developers, fellow journalist, fans, games themselves that I play, and what ever pops up on the internet I utilize and make entertaining.

NG: Who, or which sites or publications, do you most respect in the industry?

I respect Torrence Davis (www.thebitbag.com) big time Adam Sessler (X-play) Gamesonsmash.com, thekoalition.com, and more just too much to name

NG: Are there any you don’t have any love for?

Fuck bingegamer.net and planetxbox360.com

NG: What do you think brings people to your site and to your opinions over others?

People come to my site more because they can identify with me better and also I speak from a gamers perspective, as well my energy and musical talents are very entertaining as well and that’s exclusive to me no one else does that. Also I have a show that comes on every Sunday and a newly announced show called “GAME BEEFS” that’s really cool and that’s getting attention as well. Also I respond to my fans consistantly so it’s like my fans are my friends and that’s important to me you don’t get that from IGN, or Gamespot but you get that from me HIPHOPGAMER. Also when you go to sites like IGN, Kotaku, those aren’t real people who the hell is IGN it’s not a person it’s just 3 letters you know so someone like a Greg Miller can get fired and no one would really care cause IGN will still be standing and people follow IGN not the people behind the site as for me people follow me so where I go they go and that’s the power of my site it’s more personal than others and gamers like that.

NG: What do you think the biggest change in the ‘œenthusiast press’ (i.e. blogs) has been over the past few years, and where do you think HHG fits in?

The biggest change is that there’s more people being critics as opposed to just real gamers having fun and hiphopgamer fits in because I bring back the fun in gaming Example when I did my E3’08 coverage many many people said that was the best coverage over IGN, G4, and that’s major right there but the reason why was because you see me and Aaron Greenberg duke it out, as well as me and Major Nelson, I had my Michael Patcher and Ted Price holding the heavyweight belt during the interview and shit my man Cliffy B I challenged them right there and told him I’ll beat him down in Gears I mean it’s gaming fun with these higher ups that people love to see and fans don’t get chances to see that so I bring it to them.

NG: There is always a lot of talk about bias, fanboys and controversy. Do you think most of it is BS, or are these genuine issues gamers are bringing up?

Some are BS and Some are actual real issues but fanboys will always be fanboys and me personally I like fanboys to me it’s fun and it’s business and soon you’ll see what I mean on the business side of things but fanboys they never gonna go away so I just fuck with them back. But on real issues I feel that some sites and people may hold back cause of the corporate duct tape they got around there mouth but me I say what I wanna say as long as I can back it up with some good sense then it is what it is

NG: How do you deal with idiot gamers? You know, the ones that just spout utter nonsense.

LOL Idiot gamers I deal with them by allowing them to be Idiots or if it’s too outrageous I get them banned from sites and trust it’s been done already so they can fuck with me if they want to.

NG: Following on from that, do you feel the number of idiot gamers are increasing, and is that a problem?

Idiot gamers increase everyday but it doesn’t bother me I actually look at them as there idiots. It’s not a problem it’s reality and that’s what I’m about the only it’s a problem is if these idiots come in my face with bullshit then we’ll have a problem other than that let youtube shine on the idiots out there lol you feel me

NG: Is there a ‘œconsole war’ going on? If so, who’s actually fighting and who will win (if anybody)?

Of course there’s a console war going on but the fight is between Microsoft and Sony. Who’s actually winning I would say Microsoft cause of there online presense but Sony I feel is producing more of what we want to see from next gen games and Killzone 2 is just the beginning

NG: How do you deal with negativity (in all its forms) within the industry?

Well the negativity I deal with it with prayer and patience. I use it as feul to make myself better at what I do and that right there is why I’m so popular today in the gaming industry

NG: Where do you see yourself and HHG going in the future?

I will have my own show on national TV, I will make a lot of money, and I will release album, and clothing line within 4 to 5 years that’s my goal and I beleive and have faith that it will happen

NG: Finally, what is your most hated game and why?

Vampire Rain is the worst fucking game ever created. Play and you’ll see why that’s all I’m a say about that and as for NegativeGamer.com I LOVE YA’LL and thanks for doing a interview with me enjoy the show this Sunday and GOD BLESS TO YOU ALL peace.

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I’ve recently got in contact with Eskil Steenberg, the one man team behind the MMO called “Love“. After popping the question if he would be oh-so-kind to sit down with us and have an interview about his game, he kindly agreed. Now if you have no earthly idea what Love is, please read Gavin’s article here about it prior to reading through the interview.

Danshir: What got you wanting to make a video game like Love? What inspired you to make a game that must be a huge trial to do by yourself?

Eskil: The simple answer is I could do it, and I didn’t have anything else to do.

Danshir: Considering how many employees are needed to make an MMO, let alone maintain it, how daunting have you found it to perform the task of many by yourself?

Eskil: I’m developing all kinds of ways to make it easier but it is still very daunting. Even if I make it 100 times easier, I still have to work twice as hard.

Danshir: How will some of the more basic gameplay mechanics work? Will it TRULY be total freedom to manipulate one’s environment?

Eskil: No, the manipulation of the environment isn’t a very big part, the most important part is that the game itself can modify the world. The fact that i sometimes let the players do it too is more of a bonus than the main gameplay.

Danshir: After reading about your game Love, I was instantly curious of how the following scenario would play out. Since players can make practically everything as well as destroy, how would two players interact with each other (or fight each other) if someone wants to destroy what another player is building?

Eskil: At the moment any member of a settlement can modify the settlement, but you can never destroy anything of value, so hope fully it will be somewhat protected against griefing.

Danshir: Will there be any stereotypes from other MMOs such as classes and such?

Eskil: No. (Nice short answer, right?)

Danshir: Considering there are no items, how deep is character customization? While you cannot see yourself due to the game being in a first person perspective, will everyone else look the same?

Eskil: There is essentially no character customization. You have 4 slots to pick up tools, but the tools you can select from are communal and you can switch at anytime, so it doesn’t really get closer to character customization then picking up a rocker launcher in quake.

For details check out this early manual:
http://www.quelsolaar.com/love/love_manual.txt

Danshir: Is the “story” of the game entirely up to the players or will there be some type of backdrop or history before players start to shape/mold it?

Eskil: The story is what happens in the game so players will play a big part in that. The game will take place in a “universe” but what happens in that universe is up to the players.

Danshir: How much is the subscription fee?

Eskil: I don’t know yet, but given that there will be a very limited number of slots in the beginning, it may he higher than your average MMO.

Danshir: Have you considered an alternate financial models such as Micro-Transactions? What are your thoughts about RMT considering how hot a topic it has been lately?

Eskil: Micro transactions doesn’t work very well with the kind of game that I’m making, a game that is not focused on items, exp, money, or levels. Also I like for people to pay for what costs me time namely making the game, not some item that takes 10 seconds for me to change the stats on.

Danshir: You said you disregarded RMT due to not focusing on levels, items, classes, etc. What about RMT for “fluff” aesthetic items or additional content?

Eskil: I’m just not interested in making “fluff”, especially since I have so limited resources.

Danshir: Since they help pass along news about MMOs and video games in general by “word of mouth,” what are your thoughts on video game blogs or MMO blogs?

Eskil: It is always nice to get noticed, but frankly i don’t read most of it, hell, I’m not even aware of most of it. I don’t have time to google myself that much. I must say I’m very surprised how many people who read news.quelsolaar.com. Especially since it is so ”out there”.

Danshir: Considering how eccentric your game is, it is bound to receive bad press from the average gamer since Love doesn’t fall into the “World of Warcraft” mold. What are your opinions on this type of negative press especially when it comes to the generic masses that instantly flame something for being different and unique?

Eskil: I have had no negative press what so ever, so I cant see any problem at all.

Danshir: Do you have any predictions about how the general gaming populace will receive Love? I’ve personally received mixed reviews while talking about the game on forums and showing the pre-alpha video.

Eskil: I have no idea, my expectations are substantially lower them the average public’s.

Danshir: What are your thoughts on your critics?

Eskil: I don’t know if i have any, but if I do I’m probably on their side.

Danshir: Are you going to release a “free” trial to players or have beta sign-ups?

Eskil: Probably not, The issue is that since you are not building up a character you could essentially just play an endless string of trials. I’m considering letting paying players invite a  friend instead. The alpha will remain internal for the time being but I’m considering expanding it in the future.

Danshir: If you are ruling out beta invites and free trials, what are some ways you’re wanting to help advertise your game and get subscribers to try it out?

Eskil: I’m not working to advertise my game, I need to get it done rather then get players. If the game turns out to be good, players will come, if not they should do something else. The press i do is to talk to journalists when I happen to be  traveling or  just answer their mail when they contact me. But then again i try to answer all mail i get disregarding if its from Newsweek or a 12 year old who wants to get started game programming.

Danshir: Can you hook me up with a beta sign up when the time comes? ;)

Eskil: Sorry.

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