Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Oddly, Love isn’t the only trippy single-programmer MMOG with an emphasis on player landscaping and building that’s currently in beta. There’s also Neverdaunt 8Bit, or N8, which swaps procedurally generated gorgeousity and lethal roaming AI for a retro aesthetic and plain old messing around. I took a closer look at both of them recently and find myself liking one an awful lot more than the other. Find out which after the jump.
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Having pootled around in Love for a while last week, and watching Steenberg’s updates on Twitter, I decided it was time to have a decent session in the alpha build of the game. This led to me tell my girlfriend that I’d be spending the morning “in Love with James.” She didn’t bat an eyelid, used to such early-morning incoherence, and continued getting ready for work. Later, armed with Teamspeak and cups of tea, James (Arma II’s scriptwriter) and I set about investigating the indie not-quite-MMO in its embryonic stages. Our findings are below.
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Eskil Steenberg sends word that he’s opening up the alpha of his game to the public. Because it requires servers to be run to test it, he’s asking money for access at this eatly stage. You will be helping test a game, but the fee is relatively small. You can get it for 3 Euros, which is about £2.80. HOWEVER, it is not a finished product and/or service, and it is the work of a one man team. If you don’t like the idea of paying for an explicitly unfinished game, then this is not for you. If you want access to a weird and beautiful indie MMO, and to help make it work in the long run, then get your wallet out. To be sure it runs on your PC please download the client and get the alpha access details via the game itself. That way, says Eskil, you can be sure the game will function on your machine, as the world displays in the menu screen. You can follow Eskil’s ongoing updates on Twitter. And very brief first impressions follow…
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Nothing playable yet, but Steenberg has released a test client that will (via the menu screen) show how well his impressionistic multiplayer game will run on your PC. It’s kind of tantalising and frustrating to download this and not be able to log in, but by running it you’ll be helping Steenberg out by gauging interest and general PC specs for his potential audience. Also: pretty.

Steenberg says that the beta is “close” perhaps “just a matter of days”. Woo.

Go watch the video, or check out the new screenshots, to remind yourself of why we’re excited.

Graphics wizard and solo MMO developer Eskil Steenberg has just posted up a couple of videos from GDC. The first shows a substantial amount of footage from the game itself, with Steenberg playing around in the game world, building, deploying items, creating infrastructure, setting off remote radio bombs, sabotaging AI manufacturing plants, exploring deserts, and so on. Amazing stuff. Perhaps even more impressive, even for the non-technical among us, is Steenberg’s tools demo footage. Go watch. Original trailer here.

Just a random bit of newsflash from one of the games we’ve been following most closely this year: Eskil Steenberg’s latest blog entry closes with the line: “I don’t know if is possible to “manufacture” great control bugs, but its worth a try, maybe I already have. Next week when i get back home from LA, my first alpha will go out so I guess I will find out.”

Hopefully we’ll get to find out too. If you missed the trailer for this amazing looking indie MMO, check out the trailer.

Following on from the recent trailer, I decided to see if one-man-studio Eskil Steenberg would answer a few more questions about his city-building MMOFPS. Below we find out a little more about what we can expect from his strange indie project.

Jim: So, my first question is about the visual style of Love. Was it something you envisioned, or did it come about via experimentation?

Eskil: I had an original vision, but it has taken a lot of experimentation. Being a graphics programmer means that I never really stop tweaking it and testing new things.The graphics look has already moved on a bit from the trailer, even. I have clear inspirations, like Craig Mullins, Syd Mead, and Ralph McQuarrie.
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Those of you who were reading the site in February will recall my astonishment at Love, the forthcoming procedurally-generated moderately-multiplayer online world by one-man studio, Eskil Steenberg. Steenberg is a man of remarkable talent, both artistic and technical, and what I saw on his laptop screen at GDC impressed me more than any high-profile release of recent years. A wondrous, impressionistic MMO world that facilitates player creativity and encourages co-operation, that looks incredible and sounds too ambitious to be true. It’s a bold, brave project of independent game development. We’ve got the first moving images of Steenberg’s project after the jump.

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Eskil Steenberg, solo developer of the impressionistic art-MMO, Love – which I talked about in detail here – has been posting some more screenshots of his work over on his blog. I’ve collected them and posted them after the jump. The show new water rendering systems, as well as the city-rendering systems. It’s all deformable, destructible, and absolutely beautiful. (Click on the images for full-size.)

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It’s a beautiful, summery Sunday morning. Sunshine is pouring down into in Bath’s hazy valley, and I’m sat by my office window, looking out across the trees, rooftops and rusting gas towers – one of my favourite views anywhere in the world. It takes me a while to notice the chat box that is blinking patiently on my desktop. It’s Eskil Steenberg, the chap who is currently working on his solo-MMO project, Love. At that moment he’s sitting somewhere in a Wifi-field in Tokyo. We talk.
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