But he wasn’t quite sure what.
“I was in the kitchen talking to my son about, ‘Oh, what should I do?
And as a life-longCrusader Kingsplayer, the answer was clear.
“Okay!?”
“I can do that, I guess.
And he was like, sure, let’s go for it.”
“Where players could freely play and tell their stories with minimal friction.”
And what was standing in the way of that freedom?
Loading screens, says Humble.
It’s impressive stuff, but that’s not even the half of it, says Humble.
The hope is that no two conversations will ever be alike.
That, too, created another rabbit hole for Life By You’s designers.
After all, if everything’s taking place in real-time, “What happens to the clock?”
“The answer is, it’s all simulating, all the time.
Agents don’t live for 14 days, they live 75+ years.
“What happens to the person who works in the restaurant when you go home?”
he asks of other life sims.
“There’s a loading screen, and typically in games, that person doesn’t exist anymore.
In our game, we don’t get that option.
That person goes home, and you might live opposite them.
They might be bad neighbours, they might be good neighbours.
And once you start to get into that way of thinking, everything starts to flow.”
Why do this at all, I ask Humble.
“Because I haven’t seen it done before,” he says.
“Like, to actually model everybody [so they’re] on the same playing field?
That was the hardest bit, and the genesis of what we call internally the principle of equivalency.
That is, if you see a non-player character doing something, you might do it and vice-versa.
That’s the other trick hiding behind one of the doors in Life By You.
“Yeah, absolutely 100%,” says Humble when I put this question to him.
“And that’s part of the delight.
And then I might hit somebody, I’m like, ‘Okay, what does this person do?
It’s really, really fun.”
Everything is entirely editable, Humble says, “no cheat code required”.
I raise an eyebrow at this.
“Quite often players will reduce them.
I want to be grubbing, work my way up.
I really want to work for it.’
Or ‘I want my person to be miserable right now’.
Here’s the little fences.
But you’re free to just step over the fence any time you want’.
And players feel free to be able to tell their stories.
It’s their game, so why not, you know, let players do what they wish.”
“One of our designers calls it ‘designing by chance’,” he says.
When you get down a path of saying no to things versus saying yes, you go wrong.
Because the power of these games is that you want the unexpected.
So it’s okay if something happens that breaks the game.
As you’ve seen, it’s a very easily salvageable game.
That attitude also extends to a sense of trust between the player base, says Humble.
But the modding tools on offer here aren’t like those you’ve seen in other Paradox games.
The only difference is the colour of the tabs.
“We reskinned them because it used to be all multi-coloured,” Humble laughs.
There is one other small deviation from what the player will experience.
Humble selects a salon as an example.
“We’ve got a whole bunch,” he says, composing himself.
But it doesn’t stop there.
Because every item of clothing in the game is customisable.
And that applies to every article of clothing, every article of hair, eyebrow colours, everything!
Which is pretty powerful in terms of creativity.”
“That’s why you’ve seen an emphasis on traditional narrative storytelling in games,” he says.
“I think that more complex storytelling is inevitable when games are already the biggest grossing entertainment form.
But if we want to become even more mainstream, we have to embrace that.
It’s no accident that the number one best-selling or category of fiction forever has been romance.
Falling in love is not a minority interest.
We all relate to it.”
Certainly not as easy asinstalling a new graphics card, that’s for sure.
Life By You is coming to early access on September 12th onSteamand theEpic Games Storefor 35/40/$40.
