Love maker and accidental innuendo machine Eskil Steenberg is looking to go from the world of sorta-kinda-MMO to a top-down strategy game with a twist. He spilled the full details, and the future of Love on this week's PC Gamer Podcast . Here's what he's planning though - an as-yet unnamed game of light, darkness and deception that hopefully won't spend too long in its experimental stage.
"There's a planet, maybe ours, and the sun isn't rotating around it," Steenberg explains. "On the bright side. everyone burns to death; on the other side, everything's super cold, and on the rim is where people live. The game will take place on the dark side - the entire playfield is dark. If you think of most games, where you only see what your units see... it's kinda like that, except you can't see anything at all."
Not literally, of course.
"It's going to be a dark game, but then you can turn on and off lightsources, so you can say this is my building I want to protect it, so I'm going to put a bunch of light sources here, then all my snipers in the dark. When someone walks into the light, you shoot him. But of course then they can say 'okay, I guessthere's some snipers over here' and throw a flare and shoot them. Light and information are the mechanics - figuring out where the enemy is. The idea, hopefully, is you'll get that tension of sneaking up on someone, but at the same time he might be doing something similar to you."
Assuming the concept works out, Steenberg plans to start with multiplayer, then expand to single-player action later on. "Something I've learned from Blizzard is that single player is much easier to do than multiplayer. If you start with a multiplayer game, you can easily add stuff to it. If things aren't balanced correctly in single-player, making a multiplayer game out of it is really difficult."
Listen to the podcast for the rest of the interview , and find Love here.
