Indie | Anticipating Love

By Fraser McMillan

And so it begins.

Love has been a long time coming, but Eskil Steenberg has recently posted on his blog that it’s effectively finished. He’s got some way to go as far as ironing out bugs and other minor issues, but for all intents and purposes his work is content locked; that is, if “content” is the right word.

For the unenlightened, Love is a first-person, massively multiplayer, procedurally generated, truly non-linear, user-defined, cooperative, world shaping adventure. The conceit is two hundred players on the same server experiencing their planet as it evolves – a process fuelled partly by their own actions. The world never goes away, but is in a perpetual state of flux, line after line of code on the back end making this possible. Cities are to be built, energy is to be captured, enemies are to be bested, fortresses are to be dismantled, bonds are to be forged, treasures are to be found; each action has a thousand potential outcomes. It is practically a simulation of life, but faster moving, streamlined and more interesting. Not to mention that it looks absolutely gorgeous, runs on just about any PC made in the last half-decade and that the simple yet powerful tools used to shape it are open source and free. Bear in mind, of course, that the entire thing was made by one guy.

//Mad science
So, what’s the catch? Thus far there doesn’t appear to be one. I’ve been looking forward to this game for a stupidly long time, and there’s no doubt it’s as ambitious a project as we’ve seen in any medium as of late, never mind within the sequel-obsessed modern gaming scene. Steenberg is something of the mad scientist type, practically exiling himself to construct every facet of his vision and ensure its quality. He’s clearly a bona fide genius. How could this man, this insane, talented man, create something with so much potential – something so beautiful and fresh, something so far removed from what mainstream publishers are willing to do it’s verging on redefining the art-form single-handedly – entirely alone?

I can’t say I have the answer to that. But he’s on the final stretch, and us with him. As of his post six days ago he was having an issue with a pathfinding algorithm that is meant to build bridges and tunnels as and when they’re required, but it’s overactive, causing the world to look like a bowl of hazily rendered spaghetti in a matter of hours. Not great for something that could theoretically last years, but problems are obviously to be expected with so much going on at once. Besides, anyone who has been keeping tabs on its development will know that if anyone can deal with a bug, it’s Eskil Steenberg.

So, the malleable wunderkind of indie development is inbound, but we don’t yet have any kind of time frame for release or even proper confirmation of a wider beta, open or otherwise. What I can say with assurance is that it’s going to be very special when it does eventually hit. It’s been very hard not to write about this game until now, but I’ve been saving it for a rainy day and Eskil’s post was the perfect excuse to wheel out some excited warbling. I’ve spent the best part of six hundred words adding nothing to online games commentary save for gushing praise for a game going on little more than a single in-game video, a handful of screenshots and a lot of chatter, but Love deserves it, and this can be seen as a statement of intent; I’m establishing my interest here and now and encouraging you to do the same.

“We really shouldn’t be afraid of failure. Failures are easy to spot, and when something doesn’t work it won’t spread, it’s when something really works we need to be wary of its side effects. A failure is a lesson we can learn from, but success blinds us.” That’s some of Steenberg’s very own prophetic preaching. He’s wrestled with his boundless ambition for too long, and by sticking to the above and like mantras he’s drawing it dangerously close to realisation. Should he succeed, he might just revolutionise the medium as we know it.