Interview with Lars Kroll Kristensen

Seed Q&A (Page 2 of 3)

The NPCs should primarily encourage the players to role play with each other, by providing stories the players can talk about, and by “invisibly” casting players in stories with each other, either pitting them against each other, or providing them stuff to cooperate about. The NPCs provide “nudges” to point the players in the right direction.

Ideally, I would of course love that to take as long as possible, however realistically, experienced players will quite quickly spot the NPCs. We are not in the business of creating AIs capable of passing the turing test (which is exactly what they would have to be able to to fool players). We are in the business of creating a fun game.

Crafting plays a big role in Seed. Most of the in game items can be built by players, and indeed we want most items to be built by the players. Players will also be able to cooperatively modify the game world on many levels. The colony is filled with “hardpoints” where administrators can build stationary machinery necessary for the crafting Administrators decide which kinds of machine should be on his hardpoints, but administrators are elected democratically, each week.

On a larger level, various cooperative projects will allow players to improve all hardpoints in a zone, by e.g. powering up that old fusion generator in ring lab beta, giving more power to all the hardpoints. On an even larger scale, we plan to have projects creating new instances of existing zones, so a project could open a hitherto closed door, and introduce a new ring lab.

We are also planning some really large projects, allowing e.g. access to the derelict space station, or expanding the mining roots or even allowing player access to the outside world. These last kinds of projects will take enormous effort by the community, and will help direct the work of us, the developers.

All projects will also need political support, in the form of votes placed to support the project, instead of as support for an administrator. We expect fierce political debating about which kinds of projects should be supported, and which should not.

Players cannot at this time create story lines. That’s our job :) . However, the stories will mostly be about the project environment, i.e. NPCs that have their own, often conflicting, projects. The NPCs will of course try to get the players to support their project, and may even offer to sabotage opposing projects. The utopia is indeed under a great deal of stress, which shows in the NPCs, and the kinds of stories they offer.

Right now, we are investigating a set of puzzle minigames we plan to use for the research gameplay. I can’t really go into more detail right now, but we want the research gameplay to have a strong puzzle aspect.