The Seed by Misery Dev. Ltd. is a Kickstarter game that caught my eye a couple weeks ago. It looked to be a cross between Fallout and the classic PC game, Myst. Both of those games are staples of my gaming maturation. The Seed seems to be a great interactive novel that is also a game. The team of Misery Dev. Ltd. and they seem dedicated to give gamers a very unique and special experience. Last weekend, I had to the pleasure to sit down with Damjan Cvetkov-Dimitrov.
Robert Steltenpohl: First and foremost, what is The Seed?
Damjan Cvetkov-Dimitrov: A highly interactive graphical novel video game. Many words to simply describe it since we are experimenting with a bit of a new format, so it’s not easily dropped into a already defined medium
Robert Steltenpohl: I noticed that from the videos and the description. It’s kind of a melting pot of a game.
Damjan Cvetkov-Dimitrov: We are taking the experience from modding Misery and working on increasing immersion in that world heavily into the world of The Seed, and building upon it immensely.
Damjan Cvetkov-Dimitrov: and and and 🙂
Damjan Cvetkov-Dimitrov: But it truly is an interesting experience focusing on the tiny details while building an FPS, connecting text, sound events, contextual gameplay, visual aspects, into one cohesive whole. It’s kind of weird to talk about highly immersive gameplay in a interactive graphical novel, but we do, and focus on that a lot.
Robert Steltenpohl: How is the gameplay going play out? Will it be an important to the player or is it more of a facilitator?
Damjan Cvetkov-Dimitrov: gameplay is mostly funneled through the choice system via text on the left panel side, and less on the inventory on the right. There is a lot of gameplay going on in the players mind too, if he attempts to notice the subtle details of sound or visual cues, upon which he can make smarter decisions and guide his character more into the direction that he prefers. A tiny smoke in the previous scene could indicate that there is some activity if the player continues down the road, so he could take this info into account when he decides to go forth, or turn away from the road. These decisions will shape the way he experiences the world, but would eventually shape the world itself, in a very direct way … We don’t want to insert options and choice that are there just to artificially increase the choice amounts, every single choice is essential and should be well though through if the player wants to retain control over events of his character, but sometimes of course, things happen that are beyond his control or unexpected. This balance is also something we are keeping a very stoic eye upon, and consider highly important as a gameplay element.
Robert Steltenpohl: This game is narrative driven, endless possibilities, and a world that you affect directly. What inspired this game? I see a lot of Myst and Fallout in this game. Were those two inspiring games?
Damjan Cvetkov-Dimitrov: We draw from a lot of sources as inspiration. Planescape Torments textual navigation and progress was utterly influential, but we try to do our own thing here. We have a very solid idea how to translate realism and immersion into this game, and we believe that we have ideas that would push and lift people’s expectations of what this format can offer, in the future. We are not writing this as a story, or as a novel per se, but as a real experience of a person in a very unpleasant situation, and a very unpleasant world.
Robert Steltenpohl: In the description, it says that there are at least 50 different ending possibilities. How different can we expect them to actually be?
Damjan Cvetkov-Dimitrov: Well, they will be in accordance to your actions, if you were successful into managing to control the situation, or as much as possible at least, you will end up with an ending that is in context of your actions. It would reflect your actions in a concrete manner, but still, there would never be a bad or good ending, the shades of grey are absolute in this game, as in life.
Robert Steltenpohl: I have found that games have begun to only give us the illusion of “choice.” The game gives us choices but the outcomes, essentially, end the same or have the same affect. Do you find that games are doing this, as well, or am I just being cynical?
Damjan Cvetkov-Dimitrov: Absolutely, the recent buzzword of the gaming world is “multiple choice” and “play it your own way”, but that is most often just changing skins and influences main gameplay or storyline very slightly or not at all. I’ve become immune of games telling me that I can play the game the way I want to, since I know they’d just integrate some superficial choice here and there, and call it “freedom”. I still don’t feel as if I am influencing the world, shaping it, playing a part. Planescape Torment I think does this well, where all the millions of branching directions and combinations actually influence your friends in the game, your enemies, what you do in the game, how the world looks at you etc. There is still more to be done actually, since this wildly open and deep method of influencing the game was mostly textual, you didn’t see too much visually or via audio, how you influence the world. I think even more can be done in this regard.
Damjan Cvetkov-Dimitrov: So your skepticism for this is essentially spot on in regards to todays advertising of games. What our game format allows is that we can create much more choices that influence the world directly, and we can do that much more easily than with FPS games for an example, so this is feasible within our smaller team.
Robert Steltenpohl: That is so encouraging to hear. I have found myself becoming numb to games that say “open world” and “your choice.” It sounds like your game will be a breath of fresh air.
Damjan Cvetkov-Dimitrov: It used to mean a bit more, but now the world has been emptied of meaning, along with the word “procedural”, unfortunately.
Robert Steltenpohl: True. I see that your team broke the game up into “episodes.” Why did you choose that route?
Damjan Cvetkov-Dimitrov: That is a good way to distribute the game earlier, and build upon our previous experiences, while also we can focus a lot on each act. The size of the game for mobile would also be more acceptable when around 200 mb per act, instead of one single app being 600 mb. We are using HD retina resolution graphics in the game, and using a lot of these for the different scenes, graphical assets etc. The active animations like smoke, or cloud movement, or fog are actively created, dynamically and often randomised and in context with the weather pattern, timeline, so those take up more CPU and GPU than disk memory.
Robert Steltenpohl: I think that it has been shown, recently, that episodic games are becoming popular and a great way for the development teams to guarantee higher quality. Does this mean that there could be more than just 3 episodes?
Damjan Cvetkov-Dimitrov: Well if we are successful with this endeavour, we would love to continue building upon this world, but we have bigger plans for a different genre of game for the next continuation of this game world 🙂 wink wink.
Robert Steltenpohl: That’s awesome! I hope that this game is successful enough to get more. Now, how did your team come together? Are you all friends, did the stars just align, or did Captain America make the Avengers call?
Damjan Cvetkov-Dimitrov: Well we all met via the Misery mod. First time I read about the mod and played a bit, I was stunned, and I wrote to Nicolai I think it was, that I would pretty much clean bathrooms if I’m allowed to contribute into the mod somehow. So I started doing different stuff for the mod, started writing, doing SFX and ambient sounds, and we really hit it off from there. But we wanted to build something of our own, something that we can completely control and that doesn’t have inherent engine bugs that stop us dead in the tracks. So we set off to work on this project.
Damjan Cvetkov-Dimitrov: All that, and I didn’t even have to clean a single bathroom 🙂
Robert Steltenpohl: Wow.
Damjan Cvetkov-Dimitrov: What I really liked about the idea of the Misery mod, we are taking it here, and expanding on it greatly. We have untied hands now, since we have complete programming and asset control over the game. So untied hands for the first time is really nice.
Robert Steltenpohl: how does the novel reading aspect interlock with the game aspect? Does it function like a Pause button or are there only certain times when you can read?
Damjan Cvetkov-Dimitrov: You keep the pace, you have the control, but you can’t go back on your decisions once you’ve decided on the course of actions and actually pressed the choice.
Damjan Cvetkov-Dimitrov: All panels are always completely open for interaction, except when transitions happen
Robert Steltenpohl: So no saves to change your choices? (I’m looking at Mass Effect)
Damjan Cvetkov-Dimitrov: during which you hear a contextual audio drama like segment that reflects what is happening during the transition. No saves, you want to try that other option? You play it again. We want to encourage people to feel as if their character is living these things, and that there is no easy way out. It’s like playing hardcore on some games. You can’t get killed, but you can make very bad choices, and end up in a very unpleasant situation 🙂
Robert Steltenpohl: THAT’S AWESOME! I have debated with people that say taking saves out “make it too hard for gamers.” It frustrates me because I believe choices should be final, unless you completely restart.
Damjan Cvetkov-Dimitrov: I think you really have to feel that there is no Deus Ex: Machina to lift you up from distress. If shit happens to your character its because of your choices. Well you suck it up, and try your best to not make the same mistakes again. Merciless gameplay in a interactive graphical novel 🙂
Robert Steltenpohl: “graphic novel” has been mentioned a couple times here and in your description on kickstarter. Have comics had any influence with your story or type of story?
Damjan Cvetkov-Dimitrov: Comics do a different direction than us, we are more along the “choose your own adventure” books, but with a mature and dark experience, once that is realistic and unforgiving. In this game, choice makes things harder, not easier 🙂
Robert Steltenpohl: So can our hero have a happy ending?
Damjan Cvetkov-Dimitrov: No comment there, no spoilers now 🙂
Robert Steltenpohl: Sorry. I had to try.
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