TUG interview - Exclusive

We promised you we had more exclusive content on indie gaming, and we are delivering today. Please, enjoy our exclusive TUG interview with Peter Salinas, Research / Development Director at Nerd Kingdom. I’ll leave you to the interview as there’s a lot to be discovered about this very intriguing sandbox multiplayer game, but let me remind you that their Kickstarter campaign has only four days left and Nerd Kingdom could still use your help to reach funding.

First of all, thanks for being here with us. Can you please introduce yourself and your game to the readers?

Of course, my name is Peter Salinas, most people know me as Ino, and I’m a behavioral research scientist. The Untitled Game (TUG) is a sandbox fantasy game that is using the subtle application of social science to make for a new experience and way to play games.

 

Before going into the specifics of TUG, how exactly did a “collective of scientists, researchers, technologists, economists, content creators, artists, modders, and gamers from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds” come together to be Nerd Kingdom? Your composition is very unique and interesting, to say the least. You also repeatedly highlighted the importance of social science in your work, and that the game might be really helpful to understand some of the social mechanics of a community of players. Can you tell us more about this?
We all play games, plain and simple. People may not be aware of it, but there is an entire world of people outside of the industry that are as into games and creation of games as anyone else is. We all look at games differently from a lot of the industry, and have always been the ones asking “omg what if they did this,” and we apply our understanding of economies, psychology, sociology, etc. into design and play. It’s what we have done for years — even before game design was a thing, we looked at play and interactions. We all share a passion for creating worlds, and we are building off of ideas from the most brilliant minds in the world.

But it’s not just the layer of understanding interactions; a lot of us are big on quantitative stuff too. All developers gather tons of data from their players, but most ignore this data, or don’t properly interpret or apply it, or worse: choose to use just sales data to get more sales. With our team, we can look at a wall of information, and from that, gain a very intimate understanding of what is going on, why it is happening, and how we can fix or improve it. And this can be directly attributed to our science backgrounds!

 

By simply stating “survival, sandbox, multiplayer and RPG” you have put together perhaps four of the game related terms that hold the strongest appeal to me. Therefore, I must inquire: for example, when you say multiplayer, what do you really mean? Will TUG be an MMO, or which infrastructure do you have in mind for this part? Also, in terms of RPG progression, I suppose that given the nature of the game characters will likely get better at a certain skill by simply using it, like in Elder Scrolls, and I imagine you won’t have traditional “levels”. Is that right?

Well, a lot of people are calling it an MMO, so I guess you have to look at what that really means: lots of people online at once. While we certainly will allow for that, we are not confined to other typical assumptions of an MMO. The biggest difference with TUG is that you can play it single player too, and you can host your own servers if you so choose. To a lot of people, “MMO” means developer control, and that is not what we are trying to do… we certainly will have our own servers where we will dictate certain things, but we don’t want others to be stopped from making their own variations of play either.

And you are correct on our approach to levelling! We want it to be action based, not level based. We do not want a number to define the value of a player; it should be their general abilities or competencies.

 

About the survival part. The premise of the newborn Seed is really enticing, but other than that opening, what elements of survival will be featured in TUG? Will players need to feed their characters periodically?

Yes, they certainly will need to survive, and food and eating will be a part of this, but there will be some balancing so that the player does not feel punished for not eating ALL the time. There are other elements as well, like scavenging for components to create tools, as opposed to just harvesting them. Stones, vines, shells… things you can find just laying around can be used for a variety of things.

 

Of course, the sandbox nature of TUG seems to permeate the game on every level. You’ve even gone as far as saying that there is no “ending”, and such a statement will doubtlessly confuse many - can you expand on that? Also, you added that there will not be dialogue trees, but then how will players interact with NPCs, companions etc.?

While there may not be a pre-defined ending, there are lots of little things that will exist that will create conflict and interactions with other players. No one person or civilization will ever truly go unchecked, especially in a fantasy setting where anything really is possible. A “boss” is really nothing more than a powerful entity… and why can’t that powerful entity be another player who has unlocked some darker power, or who has amassed an army of bandits to ravage the lands for materials to feed his dark machines of war? Then, other players may have to band together to bring down this tyrant, as per a traditional “raid” or boss-fight. There will be other structured systems within the game as well that will encourage players to form their own narrative arcs. But story-wise, there’s no linear campaign, so there is no pre-written ending in any traditional sense.

 

Amongst the games you cited as inspiration for TUG there is EVE Online, which is considered the one and only successful sandbox MMORPG at the moment. I’m very curious about which elements you’re planning to integrate from EVE. Will players be able to form clans/guilds and build empires, conquer others, rule ruthlessly or with honor, become renown pirates or merchants, much like in CCP’s masterwork?

Economy, of course! This is more than just a term to define goods and values; this comes down to understanding how even resources are distributed, and what implications that has on an evolving world that needs materials to build. These materials create conflict, and spark play and competition. The one advantage I feel we have over EVE on the area of complexity is that in space, you have no place to hide. In TUG, you could run off to build an underground civilization or trade route to avoid conflict. Well that, and swinging swords is a bit less intimidating compared to flying ships and equipping them with the gear needed to compete!

 

Combat is a quite important aspect of most games, and TUG seems to make no exception to the rule. In this specific section of your Kickstarter description, you stated that the idea is to utilize real combat physics for dynamic and engaging battles - I’m wondering if this means that players can expect to interact with the environment and perhaps destroy certain parts of it to have tactical advantages. Also, other than the obligatory melee combat, will you stick with tech or magic based attacks for ranged combat?

There are some things that could be damaged, yes. But really its about using the environment to your advantage, and this is something unique to games like this. We will eventually see things like traps in TUG, but there are lots of interesting ways to change the world that can lead to trouble for people who do not pay attention, especially in combat.

In reference to magic vs technology, we have seen room for both, as they often could be looked at as one in the same, based on cultural understandings of them.

 

TUG is said to have a very dynamic world, in which players can expect to make strange and unexpected encounters that may affect the world itself. Considering your scientific background, I’d like to know something about your approach to artificial intelligence - do the NPCs have their own ongoing goals to pursue, similarly to Elder Scrolls Radiant AI, and will they react specifically to each different player (which is the promise of Storybricks, recently discovered to be featured in Everquest Next)?

The influences that drive our approach to NPC AI are something that tie directly in with the unique web of information within the world on our side. We plan to use the same network of data we have access to as developers to make NPCs that are responsive to changes in the world. Some may be based on relationships to you, or to others, while some may be solely based on the current state of the world’s economy… the list goes on. AI and response to complex scenarios is really just about defining “events” in a world, and quantifying them in some form. This is also something that your typical science “nerd” does. We have looked at complex human interactions for years, and we work with many disciplines to refine and perfect these kinds of systems in our own world with TUG. And the beauty of it all is really that the more time and input we have from players, the more refined we can make this formula, and the more responsive and alive those systems can become.

 

Another one of your pillars clearly is that of the procedural world generation. This topic is becoming more common by the day in the gaming industry, with more and more games using this approach, especially when they are crowdfunded. Do you think this is the future for most games? How do you plan to address the usual complaint of less detail and charisma when comparing procedurally generated environments to the handmade ones?

I think it really comes down to the proposed value of the project. I don’t think that anyone would argue that procedural generation is the way for all games. But for us, in creating a world of this scope, it’s based on numbers and refined control. Our world as we know it — the beautiful rolling hills, the unique cliff sides, the overhangs, mountains, caverns, etc. — are all inherently procedurally generated terrain. Our world is shaped by complex systems in weather, time, location, pressure, etc. Obviously, these systems are quite a bit more complex than any number generator. But, with that said, the more in tune we are with the formulas, the more profoundly beautiful and unique these generated terrain variants can be. There is a lot of fine print to what is actually procedurally generated and HOW random it is.

 

Lastly, you declared that TUG will have “integrated modding support”. This is certainly great, but I’d like to know if you plan to allow every kind of mod even on your own official servers or not - Star Citizen, the current champion of crowdfunded games, chose to limit mods for their official servers.

The “official servers,” which everyone is referring to as an MMO, will not be moddable, not even the UI, being as we want in-game items to articulate graphical changes in the players’ screen, and have all UI changes done through in-game crafting and discovery. But we are allowing players to make their own servers, and even control their own single player experience with mods. Just about anything we can do with the tools, we will let modders do as well.

 

Thanks for your time.