After a little over a month in Early Access, we asked ASKA's Creative Director Cristian Diaconescu at Sand Sailor Studios about what's next for the Viking survival/crafting game and how the Early Access process has shaped development.
Back in June, ASKA entered Early Access. Sand Sailor Studio’s Viking crafting and survival game premiered in the thick of Summer Games Fest on the heels of many games vying for players’ attention. While the survival genre is certainly a busy one, ASKA‘s hook of building a thriving community of villagers who actually complete tasks for the player immediately sold me.
The ability to cut through the tedium of resource gathering, set up defenses, and assign actual roles to the people existing inside of the player-built community was empowering–and smart. As ASKA thrives with a healthy player count and a number of patches and fixes continue to roll out, it’s obvious the 10-person team at Sand Sailor Studio has its eyes set on a piece of the survival pie. But as one of the few games I’ve spent significant time with in Early Access, ASKA‘s direction, development, and future intrigued me. Wanting to know more, I decided to speak to a member of the team.
For a deeper dive into ASKA, Creative Director Cristian Diaconescu answered my questions, from the probing to the bizarre, painting a deeper picture of ASKA and how Early Access, players, and the studio will transform the game over time.
DigitalChumps: As the game debuts in Early Access, what is the studio’s primary focus in the first few weeks? Bug fixes? Taking in feedback to build off of?
Cristian Diaconescu: We’re in the very fortunate position of having received a lot of feedback, which is fantastic, above all it means that people care about the game and they want it to succeed, they want it to grow, become better and reach its full potential. And this is very important, people immediately connected the dots and realized that the foundations we have laid are meant for growth, that the systems we now have in place are very open, flexible, that they basically allow us to move in a myriad of directions. This also means that we have to be very careful about how we decide to move forward, because we still have a lot of work to do in ASKA. Basically we have a blueprint of what the full experience needs to be, and at the same time we have to be receptive to player feedback. Luckily this has been a guiding principle of ours throughout development: iterate fast, test often and listen to the community, so in these first few weeks we’re doing a balancing act of putting out little fires (which thankfully haven’t been many) and adding in the last bits that didn’t make the day 0 build, while calibrating a much anticipated roadmap, which hopefully we’ll manage to release soon.
DC: Did ASKA start its development as a simple survival game or was there always a focus on incorporating villagers and assigned roles into the gameplay loop?
CD: Villagers were there on day 1. A core design principle has always been player-villager feature duality: whatever a player character can do, the villager must be able to do it just the same and vice versa. Villager happiness, exploration and placing new buildings, these are the only parts of the game that are unique to either villagers or players. Other than that every interaction and feature has been developed with the AI Villagers in mind. Whatever you can do, they can do.
DC: I found that giving my villagers tasks like simple gathering and crafting allowed me to focus more on the things I wanted to do. Do you embrace giving players that kind of agency or do you want to find some ways to limit how much they can lean on the NPCs?
CD: Exploration, placing buildings and getting new villagers are the only aspects that must absolutely be player-driven. Beyond that players are free to do as they wish, we merely gave them tools and toys to play with, how they use them it’s up to them, we just have to make sure they work, however I will say that you won’t get far without the villagers. They’re your team members and you will need them, they’re more than just a fun gimmick, they’re a core part of the game. The one thing a player can’t delegate is problem-solving and design. That’s the player’s true strength, the ability to make decisions. Everything else can and should be delegated.
DC: Are there any hard limits the team has on what can be done in a settlement? Should players expect castles? What about romances or relationships that could lead to children running around a village and doing a task? Well… maybe you don’t want to risk a pack of wolves invading and snacking on newborns…
CD: There’s this thing we once said in a stream about adding children in-game: adding babies also involves adding dead babies, and there are many other things we’d like to add to the game before we even get to questions like that. We have our work cut out for us even without babies. The most important thing we always have to keep in mind when adding complexity to the villagers is that we’re in a 3rd person perspective, there’s a hard cap of micromanagement added by the POV itself. When you’re top down it’s easier, you scroll around, you perform tens, hundreds of interactions per minute – this isn’t the case for a 3rd person survival game. Things take time, you can’t keep an eye out on everybody all at once, everything is more grounded. Personally we find it uncanny to try to romance what are essentially your servants. We’d rather focus on those castles you mentioned, which is something we’d much rather do.
DC: Once winter hit in ASKA, I quickly realized how unprepared I was for the harsh circumstances. What ways do you hope to guide difficulty for the player? Or do you hope they learn by doing?
CD: As gamers we appreciate most those experiences that leave room for trial and error, that enable and empower our curiosity. We’ve never been the ones to handhold players which at the same time doesn’t mean we’re out to frustrate anybody. We’re not trying to build unfair experiences. At the same time we try to build experiences that are anchored in reality and experiences that reward players who trust their own designs and curiosities, and above all are not afraid to fail. Our best moments in gaming were those where we managed to overcome great challenges, those are the moments that become core memories. We’re trying to build the environment for this sort of experiences.
DC: Difficulty and balance can be tricky in survival games but sometimes players want things casual or punishing. Have there been talks to incorporate a kind of “free” mode where materials are infinite? What about modifiers that add new challenges?
CD: I think there’s room for a wide variety of playstyles in ASKA, and difficulty is definitely a priority topic. The way we built the game will allow us to eventually open a fair part of it to players, it’s one of the beauties of working on a systems-driven sandbox game, it opens up so many possibilities. There is however a core feeling of the game that we need to nurture, regardless of how easy or hard the game is, it has to feel “ASKA”.
DC: With ASKA taking place in a viking setting, how does the team plan on using the mythology and imagery further in the game?
CD: It’s safe to assume we’ve barely scraped the surface when it comes to Norse mythology and how we take inspiration from it. Whenever we have to add something to the game, we first try to see if we can give it a historical, cultural basis. Take for instance metalworking, which we’re pretty happy with. We obviously knew this had to be part of the game, but we tried to find something that’s true to that period and area, and that’s how the Bloomery building was born, because it’s honestly such an interesting process, which also took us out of the whole copper/bronze/iron/steel/mithril RPG progression trope. If there’s a need for magic, we try to go through the eddas, through the sagas, see if there’s anything in there we can use to give a game element some extra substance and reinforce the theme. And on that note I’d like to add that we’ve never set out to make a documentary, it’s still low-fantasy, it’s a loose interpretation and it definitely has our spin on the whole thing.
DC: Should players expect deep quest systems down the line? Perhaps a villager requests something from the player or unique events play out during exploration that allow players to uncover narrative secrets.
CD: We’re steering clear of quests, we’re not making an RPG, and we don’t have to because the village and world generates true needs. We don’t have to add a villager that sends you out for fictional requirements, because if a villager is truly missing something, you’ll feel it and you’ll want to fix that, because you’ll feel it in the economy. We don’t have to send you out on quests because you’ll take on “quests” yourself. We don’t have to fake it, the world and village is already a story generator. What better reason to fix and issue a “quest” other than the true survival of the village, even more so, the village you yourself built. That being said, we’re keen on environmental storytelling, so we’ll keep adding little details,
props and monsters to make the world richer and richer.
DC: ASKA strikes me as a very ambitious take on a few genres, have you had to scale back its vision during this process? Do you think players are going to request mechanics you’re already working on or want to incorporate in time?
CD: We adjusted our expectations a few times during development and this usually happened after testing in the community. One feature that was added pretty early on is the party system, basically any villager could be added to your party and we duplicated every interaction as a party interaction. Instead of picking something up, you’d point at the item and ask the villager to pick it up. Look at a tree and you’d be able to ask the villager to chop it, and so on – worked for combat as well. It was a ridiculously powerful system and at first it felt great, but we quickly realized that it had several negative side effects: the players would become over reliant on this and get bogged down in a micromanaging loop. Players showed a tendency to avoid doing any task themselves, on top of which the villagers were put in situations where they could no longer be self-sufficient because the player would constantly override their brain. Plus it was extremely unfriendly in terms of onboarding and incomplete as a power-player tool. So we shelved it and decided to focus on a proper progression where new players get the chance to steadily learn the buildings, the mechanics, the resources, how the villagers work and so on. But this system ended up being used for the dogs and will definitely be reused later on when we finally get to add in the warband, so I think this is a good example of being maybe too ahead of the development curve and having to take a couple of steps back.
DC: What has been the longest period of time anyone on the team has lasted in ASKA? Years? Has the team done any challenge runs that players might want to attempt themselves?
CD: I think some of us have several saves that go up to day 300+, so that’s 10+ years in-game. As for challenges, we try sometimes to see if we can survive only through hunting, fishing, or farming, some of us prefer building in very hostile areas of the map for the extra thrill, building as tight as possible for a more crowded medieval feel, multiple villages that are set off really far away from one another with each focusing on a different industry, all sorts of silly stuff like this. Oh,and the yet unachieved “chop-down-ALL-the-trees” challenge.
DigitalChumps would like to thank Sand Sailor Studio and Cristian Diaconescu for allowing us the opportunity to experience ASKA in Early Access and to take a peek into the process behind making the game.
