4cr Interview – Eskil Steenberg (LOVE) – Pt. 1

LOVE may very well be the most interesting concept in gaming to come around in years. It is not something that appears promising because of some small hook or a single unique concept, but because it looks to be an amazingly fleshed out creative endeavor with a myriad of possibilities that result from giving unprecedented control of a 3D world to the gamers who will play in it.

I could spend a few hours trying to articulate how interesting this game looks, but you can see it for yourself by watching these video clips of the game and software in action. What is at least equally as impressive as the promise offered by LOVE is the fact that it is being developed in its entirety by one Eskil Steenberg. Everything has been done by him on his own time and with no outside funding. So, rather than feeling embarrassed by considering what I’ve been doing in my free time, I asked Eskil for an interview and he kindly obliged.

This is what he had to say about the pleasures of software development, how to let a game tell a story, creativity, and LOVE.

I’d like to start off by explaining the seemingly haphazard presentation of the interview. I was expecting to conduct this interview using an IM/chat dialogue format, but when Eskil and I started talking he suggested we just talk to each other over Skype and I instantly agreed without considering the addition responsibilities that I would incur as a result of this change in format. After about ten minutes of trying in vain to configure the recording software properly, I embarrassingly resigned to attempting to transcribe Eskil’s responses by hand. Needless to say, much of his elaborate train of thought was often too much for my WPM skills to manage so that is why this is going to be formatted as half inteview, half a reflection on an interview. I can tell you now though, what I’ve (poorly) managed to record and share here hardly feels like even half of the elaborately complex and often inspiring responses that he would give to the prompts I’d ask him. Anyway, enough of my excuses…

We’ll start with this quote from Eskil:

“It really started with me figuring out that there was no part in game development that I couldn’t do myself.”

My early questions for Eskil were focused on his background and where he had acquired the skills necessary to tackle something as daring as LOVE. He explains to me that he is a jack of all trades, not only having a strong background in programming but in art and design as well. He started out as a graphics artist before becoming a programmer, but programming is the thing that he really took a shining to because he enjoyed the effectiveness of being able to create his own tools whenever he felt the need. Using the talents that he’s acquired in his career he decided that seeing as how he’s a big fan of video games and all, he may as well make one. Believe it or not, LOVE is his debut.

“I’m extremely pragmatic when it comes development, it’s important to have ideas that work.”

If anything, “pragmatism” is his motto. He stressed how important it is to him that the things he does while developing the game make sense. Here is how he explained the approach:

“I wanna use the technology and programming to do really cool things instead of high in the sky things that don’t really work. This approach leads me to be innovative in pretty much everything. That goes from programming and all the little technical things all the way up to graphics and pretty much everything. I feel having the constraints of being very very practical produces a lot of creativity.”

I found it interesting that he cited pragmatism as a source for creativity instead of an excuse for the lack thereof.

Listening to Eskil talk about his approach to laying out the game, I was amazed by how straight-forward and simple he made it all sound. Most of the time when I hear someone talk this confidently about making a game, I’m reading a post on a forum by some kid who doesn’t know the first thing about the effort required beyond the initial conception. And here he was talking not about how he had this “r4dical idea”, but instead about how he had a fully fleshed out concept of how to do this system, and network, and programming, and how he just desired to build all of those things and then he would figure out the other pitfalls of game design along the way.

What most people would consider the hard and boring part of game design was the part that Eskil began with. It was a total reversal of the stereotype about people who want to make games, but the more I listened to him talk the more it seemed fitting for him. I mean, in the end, instead of having a thread of mockers making fun of his poorly thought out concept, Eskil actually has an amazing trailer showcasing the fruits of his labor.

The next thing we talked about was how he perceived the role of the developer in making games and exactly how far they should craft the experience. I brought up this description of him that Crispy Gamer used in their interview: “Instead of playing God, the guy who creates every little piece of the world by hand, Eskil plays Big Bang, creating the forces of nature that shape the world.” His response:

“I think that’s the future of gaming. Well, that should be the future, but I’m not convinced other people are doing it. My point of view is that the point of a game is to make something interactive. The point is to take power from the people who make the games and give it to the people who play the games. By definition, a game should be less expressive than a movie or book where as a creator you control the experience. In a game if you try to control the experience you’re missing the point. I think game development is one of the hardest types of art.”

And now comes an odd but strangely apt metaphor for game design using the world of fashion:

“I think it’s like fashion design because a fashion designer hasn’t succeeded if someone’s wearing a dress and someone says “Who’s wearing that great dress?” Success comes when someone says “Who’s that great looking lady?” because if the dress makes the woman look good than that’s a success. Similarly, I think games should be like that. It should be “Look what I did in the game,” not, “Look what the game showed me.” You have to be really humble when you make games: it’s not about you, it’s about the player. You have to step back, you have to create something that’s sort of the arena for the player to do what they want to do. That means we as designers shouldn’t at all build objects and missions and things to do, but rather build things that build things that create things to do. A game that has a certain amount of content and the content is on a disc can only be the content you download, but if you have a piece of code that can generate content it can not only be infinite but also respond to the players. Different content for different situations I feel empowers players and I think that it should empower players.”

It’s impressive that Eskil has managed to make as much of the game as he has by himself, but of course that alone can’t explain how hardcore he really is. It turns out that Verse and Loq Airou, the primary modeler and render he’s used during development, are tools that he made from scratch as well. Granted, they existed before he decided to make LOVE, but it’s impressive nonetheless. He had quite a bit to say about how to effectively manage and develop the tools that are used in the game design process:

“I made a lot of the tools beforehand so everything wasn’t made specifically for LOVE and that’s a very important point. Take Pixar and Renderman–that’s the rendering engine they use in house. If they make a movie and they want to do something in a movie they just walk next door and say “Hey , I want to do this.” That means they have an asset in company that their competitors don’t have because they do it all in house. If you compare that to another company like ILM who may be an amazing technical company but the difference is that they develop a lot of tools internally and it’s totally internally. Nobody sees it and they tailor it for themselves. Now, Pixar also sells their tools in addition to using them. They don’t make tools to make Wall-E because their customers will make everything but Wall-E so they have to be very flexible. So, when they bring people on board they are already familiar with Renderman whereas ILM people have to learn from scratch. So being flexible works very well for game development and starting from scratch doesn’t really work that well. The problem with that is that engines are bound to specific hardware, a console, or a specific generation of consoles and five years down the line it won’t matter anymore. If you look at Maya or 3D Studio Max, you see it’s better to make more flexible tools because they last a lot longer.”

Listening to Eskil throughout this interview as he explained his ponderings on game development and design, I felt like I was taking part in a rather rewarding lecture. It quickly became me trying to scramble and take as many notes as possible instead of guiding the interview. As a result of all the information I gathered during our talk I’ve decided to split this interview into two parts, this being the conclusion of the first and the second coming in a few days. There’s actually information on LOVE itself in the second half of the interview too, so if that’s the sort of thing you’d like to know about then be sure to check back soon.