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Interview: Eastasiasoft’s Aidan Price on Lost Sea

At PAX earlier this month Stevivor had the chance to speak with Price, game designer for Eastasiasoft’s upcoming indie title Lost Sea. Read on for details of the game, and a look into building a preocedurally-generated experience.

Matt Gosper, Stevivor: For anyone who hasn’t heard about Lost Sea, can we start with the elevator pitch for the game?

Aidan Price: OK, so in Lost Sea you take the role of a person who’s been stranded in the Bermuda Triangle, so you’ve got to explore these procedurally-generated islands and gather resources that you can use to repair your ship and ultimately escape.

Stevivor: Overall, was there a single concept or mechanic you wanted to explore with the game?

Price: Yeah, one of the things we really wanted to do early on was something with procedural generation, so that was a big appeal for us. Also we’re only a small team, so having the procedural generation stuff really helped. The other thing was that we didn’t want to make a game that was super punitive, really really punishing, so we’re trying to make it challenging in terms of making difficult decisions. That’s why it’s been great to come to PAX, to get people to play it and get that feedback.

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Stevivor: Procedurally-generated games have become really popular over the last few years – you have Minecraft, Don’t Starve, Spelunky — what is one element that you would say really sets Lost Sea apart from those other games within this sub-genre?

Price: Just from a technical level the way that we generate the maps is very different – a lot of the time with procedural generation, if you want a landscape you get these very organic structures, the way we do it is more like a dungeon. The island is broken up into different hexagonal-shaped ‘rooms’, and then those rooms are sort of assembled into the shape of an island. Then we backfill all the beaches around it and put all the content inside it, and there’s a couple other rules in there that determine what areas are raised and so on. I think one of the appeals of procedural generation for indie devs is they, I think for the most part they try to make more system-driven stuff as opposed to narrative- or setpiece-driven stuff. They want people to experience the system but with different settings each time. Different conditions each time. I don’t think that would work for something like Call of Duty, where it’s very setpiece-driven.

Stevivor: So with the malleable nature of the game, that would naturally affect some of the rules and constraints of building the game. How has that affected you?

Price: From a technical and development standpoint, you tend to do more work upfront. The benefit of that is that we do the work upfront – like the algorithm and the various bits and pieces – and then we basically have limitless content. We can just keep rolling, rolling, rolling islands until we get the one we want in the case of PAX. For the full game it means – we’re developing it, and we’re already being surprised when we’re working on it.

Stevivor: Have you had any particularly unusual results from the generation that have caused you to rewrite the rules for the game?

Price: Some yes and some no… Some cool stuff that we got was – we didn’t program for it, but it started making interior lakes. So it would make a gap in the world and then fill a beach around it, and it basically looked like a lake. So we decided to keep that because it was pretty cool. A lot of the other nitty-gritty stuff, like things start to fall apart when you have thousands and thousands of rooms. We were pushing to see just how big we could make it, so we had to dial it back a bit.

Stevivor: Within the game there are several characters you can play as or recruit. Do they have different skills or attributes that affect the gameplay?

Price: Well no, and the main draw for that is – you mentioned Spelunky earlier. When people are playing that everyone has their favourite character, and we wanted to give the player someone they wanted to control around the world, give them a bit of choice. Because we’re trying to make quite a lighthearted… Not comical, but we wanted it to be quite colourful and lighthearted, it gives us a good excuse to come up with lots of different characters and kind of push that a little bit.

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Stevivor: So on top of the resource collection in Lost Sea there’s also a combat element to the game. What kind of mechanics do you have in place for that combat side of things?

Price: You’ve got the player combat, and right now you’ve got a machete and you can attack the creatures with that. Each critter then has its own behaviours, so when the player is engaging with the creatures they’ll soon learn ‘oh, this guy will do a ground pound’, or ‘this guy will come charging at me’, ‘this guy will get angry when I hit him’. We’re also going to add in a special attack to mix it up a bit. A lot of the feedback we’ve gotten from PAX, which has been really interesting, is that everyone wants to be able to dash which is something we never really considered internally. Which is why it’s always so valuable to come here. And the other side of it is, you’ve got the melee combat but you’ve also got totems which are almost a tower defense element. So there’s an element of tactics to that as well. So if you know there’s a lot of bad creatures you can put a healing totem behind you, go and engage them, fall back, heal up, then go and do it again. Or you can drop some more offensive totems.

Stevivor: Within the game will there be different worldscapes or themes to the islands?

Price: Yeah! So we’ve only got the one here at PAX which is the typical jungle, tropical island one, but we’ve got a bunch of different ones planned. The standard variations like a desert one, ice… But we’ve also got a couple of more sort of mysterious ones, I don’t know how to say it. Almost sort of science fiction-themed ones. Not your standard terrain types.

Stevivor: Are you intending for that to be something randomly chosen each time you play, or used as a form of progression?

Price: Well, in addition to the regular islands that you explore you also have secret islands with key landmarks and things you can discover. I don’t know if you remember from the old Fallout games, but when you’d be traveling around the map screen you’d get these random encounters? So they’re a little bit like that. When you go to these islands they might have a different theme, and you can find something special there.

Stevivor: At this stage, what platforms are you targeting for the game?

Price: Definitely PS4 and Xbox One, and we’re doing Steam Greenlight at the minute. One of the bits of feedback we’ve been getting a lot is that people would really like to see it on Vita, and because we’re a relatively small team and we’re using Unity, that is something we can actually seriously consider. There’s also a couple more platforms we’re still talking about but haven’t announced yet.

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Stevivor: At this stage in development do you have an idea of the release window for the game?

Price: We’re aiming for Q3 2015 – we can’t put a definite date on it because we’re doing two platforms at the same time, PS4 and Xbox One. It really depends on how certification shakes out as to when they’re both ready.

Stevivor: Finally, if you could name one feature or aspect of the game that could draw people in, what would it be?

Price: I think the biggest one for most people is the procedural work stuff. Most people who have come up to the booth who have seen the trailer or some of the other promotional material are quite intrigued by that.


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About the author

Matt Gosper

aka Ponk – a Melburnian gay gamer who works with snail mail. Enthusiastically keeping a finger in every pie of the games industry. I'll beat you at Mario Kart, and lose to you in any shooter you can name.