Interview With PCGamesN!

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott-Park)]

If you are curious about my take on a variety of things relating to this game and the 4X genre in general, here's a fun interview I did recently: https://www.pcgamesn.com/heart-of-the-machine/new-4x-game-exclusive-interview

[Vasquez]

This game will be a huge success Iam taking bets

[Oya]

Originally posted by x-4000 (Chris McElligott-Park):

As a smaller creator, there’s just no way for me to compete head-to-head with the biggest studio games, and trying to out-graphics them is beyond me.

Very true. But you still had to superimpose a 3d layer on your 2d gameplay. I hope the countless hours will be paid up at last.
But I want to raise an issue here since I do not participate on discord. Androids/ gynoids should look like people, not robots. The whole point of Philip K. D____'s Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep is that if you cannot tell the difference between a human and an android, then there is hardly any difference. Same with cinematic androids/ gynoids. I am splitting hairs off course, but you might want to consider it.
P. S. I had to misspell the name of the author since Steam censor treats it as a profanity.

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott-Park)]

I spent a lot of years working in pure 2D, and I got kind of tired of it. There are certain things that just don't come across well in that style, and 3D lets you show things well. I also really enjoy working in 3D, and it was a hobby of mine as far back as 1998. But I go for a stylized look rather than something photoreal.

The robot designs in general here are all final, and all say something about the state of your machine intelligence as it was creating them. There are a lot of designs that are not in the demo, but in general the machine intelligence is not trying to be a human. It's expressing itself in a variety of ways, sometimes as trauma art (in the case of three specific units after a major event that can happen).

But never fear! There are units called Mimics which are the ones that are meant for blending into human crowds. There's a male and female version, and their whole deal is trying to blend in like you're talking about. At first they smell funny, and only blend in at a distance in a crowd. They're also toxic to the touch for regular humans, so that's... not going to work for up close work. For the initial build, that's as far as the game takes them, because they weren't a huge focus for starting storylines.

But I plan on having some various ways of making those into progressively more realistic so that they blend in, and can eventually get into Stepford situations where they replace a specific person and their spouse doesn't even know. That's quite a ways off, as there needs to be a lot of build-up to that.

In general, I'm overall taking the attitude that the machine intelligence is a product of its environment, and is reacting to what it sees around it, and its designs are based around that. Overall the machine intelligence is not interested in becoming a human for the sake of being more human-like (that was a big thing in Asimov writing, and with Data from Star Trek, and while I have a soft spot for that, it doesn't ring true to me as a writer). This machine intelligence makes human-replacement robots (mimics) specifically for subterfuge/warfare purposes, and might curiously try blending in as a peer with humans, depending. But it's not wanting to be a human.

One key thing is that this machine intelligence is a distributed one, so all of the android lines are different aspects of its personality, and it inhabits all of them at once. The idea of being in only one body would be super limiting to it, although that's how it starts in the intro.

THAT said, in the launch build there are already cases where certain parts of itself may not always agree, and may fork off or diverge while they are disconnected from the larger group.

TLDR there's a whole mythos here to explore! The lore is rich and consistent, and I'm focused on storylines that move it forward during Early Access, as well as things like clarity and consistency improvements, etc. The fundamentals of the game are already rock-solid like a 1.0 release.

[Oya]

Originally posted by x-4000 (Chris McElligott-Park):

I spent a lot of years working in pure 2D, and I got kind of tired of it.

You surely did, but you were also given the advice that 2D games do not sell well. And quite reasonably you followed it. This damned 3D thing will be getting in your way for the rest of the development cycle and modders are certainly not going to make 3D models. Not to mention the issue of the minimum system requirements. But on the other hand, what do I know ?

Originally posted by x-4000 (Chris McElligott-Park):

One key thing is that this machine intelligence is a distributed one, so all of the android lines are different aspects of its personality, and it inhabits all of them at once.

This is a brilliant observation, I am looking forward to see degrees of self-sufficiency and autonomy in AI emanations and all sorts of split personality effects. Let me say also that the machine intelligence can have human employees that have no idea what they are doing. It is currently happening all over the world.
Thank you for reading.

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott-Park)]

Originally posted by Oya:

but you were also given the advice that 2D games do not sell well. And quite reasonably you followed it. This damned 3D thing will be getting in your way for the rest of the development cycle and modders are certainly not going to make 3D models. Not to mention the issue of the minimum system requirements.

Rimworld is one of the best-selling indie game of all time, on Steam. 2D games sell just fine. Norland, which Hooded Horse published recently, is 2D and had way more wishlists than Heart of the Machine. Nobody has ever told me that 2D games don't sell, or has pressured me in any way to switch to 3D. I made the shift because it was what I, personally, wanted to do.

I plan to be working on Heart of the Machine for a long time, but eventually there will be a next project. For that one, what I want to do is a 3D/2D mix kind of like what ANNO: Mutationem does, but my own spin on it. Several other games have also done this recently, and I find it interesting. It wouldn't have been a fit for Heart of the Machine, but still.

I am a 3D modeler and have been since 1998. I can make changes to 3D models, and make them what I want them to be, as needed. There's also a lot of lighting and whatnot that I can do as a technical artist. But I am not a 2D artist of any stripe. So if I want to work semi-solo, I have to lean on 3D in some way. With A Valley Without Wind 1, this meant I was rendering 3D models into 2D sprites, ala the original Donkey Kong Country. But I found that I was constantly fighting with light and shadows, and super duper frustrated.

I also hate being resolution-bound by 2D stuff, and having strict limitations on zoom. I also _love_ lighting and in general atmospheric effects, and I dislike how hacky that is in a 2D environment. It's slow to develop, and a pain, and often doesn't look as good as just working in 3D unless you have some REALLY talented programmers on it (see: Dead Cells).

Contrary to being a burden, being able to work in 3D set me free. I've been a 3D artist since before I was a programmer. I have zero interest in trying to be photoreal, but I love NPR techniques and use them extensively, like the Matcap approach that gives a surreal sense to this game, for example.

The load on system requirements can also be higher from 2D, under some circumstances. It really depends, but basically... well, it's really complicated honestly. 2D is better at some things, and 3D is better at others. In my next title, eventually, that's why I want to work on fusing the two more. But I'll have to have sufficient funds to really hire a bunch of 2D artists, since I can't work in that way.

Anyway, just to set a few assumptions to rest. I can see why you would think what you did, but that's really not how things went down.

Originally posted by Oya:

Originally posted by x-4000 (Chris McElligott-Park):

One key thing is that this machine intelligence is a distributed one, so all of the android lines are different aspects of its personality, and it inhabits all of them at once.

This is a brilliant observation, I am looking forward to see degrees of self-sufficiency and autonomy in AI emanations and all sorts of split personality effects. Let me say also that the machine intelligence can have human employees that have no idea what they are doing. It is currently happening all over the world.

Thank you! And yep, in the launch build you can form your own shell company and hire people, and they have no idea they are working for you. It's a really important mechanic for doing certain kinds of scientific research.

It's a way of having two identities that, in the common knowledge of people in the city, are unrelated to each other. There's your shell company, doing whatever it does, and then "the thing from the tower," which is you, but a lot of people are not sure what that is. Is it a new development from a company? Is the megacorp doing something? Is it aliens? An AGI? A lot of people aren't sure for a long time.

[Oya]

A brief comment on the differences between 2d and 3d in gaming, if you are not interested please ignore this post.
Let us assume that you are playing Heart of the Machine on a Google Map, satellite view, clicking on the map and reading text boxes and numbers. I call that 2d narrative mode. Let us now assume that you can zoom in all the way down and have a look at a landscape that looks much like ANNO Mutationem, have full camera control and can interact with people and things. I call that 3d cinematic mode. I think that these two modes are incompatible with each other because they engage different cognitive modules of the human mind and activation of one inhibits the other. You can confirm that intuitively by trying to play chess and watch a movie at the same time.
In the beginning all video games were 2d, things were represented abstractly, the imaginative mind had to engage. Then things changed.
What hurts me most is that if Heart of the Machine was made on 2d, the modders could create new content for decades, drawing on the huge SF and RPG literature (check Paranoia) adding things as far as your imagination can go. But not now.
And yes the calculus of what kind of games you make and the way you are making them is influenced by financial considerations.
I ask myself why games like Skyward Collapse are no longer made. But that is another story.

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott-Park)]

If you look at the history of Arcen's titles, the only ones where modders have been adding to things routinely is AI War 2, which is in 3D.

A lot of prior games had the ability for modders to add art or even content, and they were ignored for whatever reason. Several even had level editors with them, and nobody used them at all.

I can never predict how the modding community is going to react to one of my titles, regardless of how many modding tools I provide for them. In the end, that is a deep tertiary concern for me. I'm making art that I want to make, because I want to make something specific. If people decide to mod it, then that's great, but that's a bonus to me, not the goal.

I definitely get your points, but at the end of the day I'm making a creative work and expressing myself the best way I can, in the way that speaks to me personally.