In addition, if you say something and the character doesn’t see anything in there it can parse, it records it, and so that sends a mail. Every day Scott and his team get a sweep of what things people have said to the NPCs that the NPCs didn’t understand, and if they look at those and it looks like something that, “Oh, it’s actually reasonable that that character probably should know about that,” then they add it. So our characters are getting smarter and smarter and smarter as time goes on within the game.
Back in episode ninety-one of this show we interviewed Felicia Day, who mentioned she’s a huge Ultima fan, and she actually has some of her fan poetry online. I was wondering if you had seen any of that stuff.
Yes, I have. Some of her fan poetry is probably the first way I became a big fan of hers. It’s the first time she really strongly came on my radar. Of course it would make sense that people would forward it to me and bring it to my attention, but in reverse, the more I have seen and heard about Felicia, and watched her YouTube channels and things of this nature, frankly the more of a Felicia Day fan I have become. I find Felicia’s success to be a harbinger of the future of television-style media. Here’s my case: When I go to places like DragonCon, I’ve been going to conventions forever, and it’s interesting to see who shows up as a fan to different kinds of presentations at these conventions. For example, an artist: There’s lots of artists who show up at conventions to show off their art, and maybe sell a little bit of it, and they get a line of people around their little booth. You then get up to some book authors, and some book authors might have a few more people who show up at their talks or their booths and queue up to meet them or get a picture, or an autograph, or whatever it might be. Then you have computer game developers like myself who might command a similar or a little more people based on the popularity of their titles. Then you move up to a whole other class, which you get to for, like, television and movie stars. TV and movie stars command a much bigger audience in the big rooms for the fans that show up for the television and movie stars.
And now there’s even bigger. Now there’s people like Felicia Day. For example, at this last DragonCon that I was at and she was at, for her talk, they had to book the big ballroom in an entire other hotel that had a bigger ballroom than any of the main DragonCon hotel rooms so they could fit the tens of thousands of people in who wanted to see her and her team get up and talk about their latest machinations on life. To me, I look at that and go, “That is so much more powerful.” The podium that she now has reaches the younger, fast-growing demographic of an audience. If people in normal broadcast television aren’t paying attention to this, they’re going to, yet again, lose out.
Another good case study is the Rooster Teeth folks back in Austin, Texas, who, for their Red vs. Blue and other shows they do, they often even have a bigger audience than Felicia. And in Austin they just bought the entire television studio of what used to be a big studio of (I can’t remember if it was NBC or CBS or ABC or who it was) but a big production studio in Austin, Texas that went out of business for traditional media and was bought up by Rooster Teeth, which is now expanding into it. So I think things like you’re doing, these podcasts, and with the on-demand, whether it’s radio, or video, whether it’s television or movies, is inconsequential to me. This on-demand nature, I’m seeing the consumer base shift to it. I’m seeing marketing dollars shift to it. And I think traditional media needs to pay attention or they’ll miss it.
I also wanted to ask you about The Space Bards “Return of Lord British” music video, which I absolutely love. I must have watched that thing a hundred times.
It’s phenomenal.
How did that come about and what was your reaction to it?
We were doing this during the Kickstarter. One of the things we realized during the Kickstarter—if we did a Kickstarter again we’d do it considerably better, I think. I’m not complaining about how we did, but it was an interesting learning experience—One of the things we learned as we were going through it is that we really need to be interactive with the community more and more, and one of the ways that we did that is we began to run contests. We were close to the end, we were within a week of the end of the Kickstarter, and we decided to run on one weekend a three-day, so seventy-two-hour, contest that said, “Hey, whoever can produce the best video that we can use as advertising for Shroud of the Avatar, we’ll give you something. Some cool upgrades or whatever it might be.” Then we began to watch over the next seventy-two hours as people began to turn things in. Of course, the first twenty-four hours, the things that we got in were fun and they were interesting, and it was cool that people took time out of their lives to do it, but they wouldn’t be things that we could release and actually sell people on who we were and what we were doing here. But by the time we got to the end of Day Two, we began to get things that were really good. In fact, there’s a woman who was our leading contender up until The Space Bards—a woman named Ember Isolte. Ember’s is kind of a medieval, traditional-styled piece, great music, great lyrics, very well sung: We thought it was going to be the winner. Hers was so much better than the other folks through the entirety of Day Two that she was the assumptive winner.
Then, within four hours or so of the close of Day Three, The Space Bards gave us their “Return of Lord British” and we were stunned. It was so good. We actually started feeling bad because we liked Ember’s piece so much. It’s great and Ember’s a great member of our community. We love her to death. We think her work is phenomenal. But for this particular contest, for this particular need, for what we were trying to do to market the game and just to have fun with it and around it, Space Bards nailed it. So we have been not only so thankful to The Space Bards, we’ve become big Space Bards fans. We all contributed to their Kickstarter to do music themselves. They’ve gone on to do music at a Blizzard Con and other things too. They’re making a good run of it as a band independently and still are producing music for us in-game that is just phenomenal.
I saw in a video that you recently bought a brownstone in New York City. I live in New York, so I was just curious: What brings you to the city?
Marriage brings me to the city. I met my wife when she was on vacation and technically I was working, just after my spaceflight. I happened to be on the island of St. Barts, where my company had sent me to give a speech, and she happened to be on the same island, but did not come to the speech there over Christmas break. But over about a twenty-four-hour period, we ran into each other. One night just after dinner was our first kind of brief encounter, then we happened to go to the same restaurant for breakfast, then we were in the same general place for lunch, then the next afternoon we were on the same small plane off the island. So four times in a row in twenty-four to forty-eight hours, and that kind of kicked off at least a conversation—which, even though I went back to Texas and she went back here to New York, the interest was high enough we kept communications up and eventually led to a couple of years ago us getting married.
I saw that you keep in touch with the office in Austin with a telepresence robot.
That’s exactly right. In fact, we have two there now, and I have third now on order just because that’s essential. I split my time about fifty/fifty between Austin and New York, but when I’m here in New York, when I get up in the morning I sit down at this desk that I’m talking to you from right now, I power on my telepresent robot in Austin, and I wander the halls and go to the meetings and participate just as if I was there. Unless I’m on a call like this, I’m full-time in my office and wandering the halls as normal, just through a telepresent robot.
Also, was it your mom that came to your wedding via a telepresence robot?
Yeah, in fact, that’s what we bought the robot for originally. When my wife and I decided to get married, she’s French and she wanted to get married in France where she has an enormously large extended family. My extended family is only half a dozen people, so it’s a lot easier for us to travel, except for my mothe
r, who is over eighty years old and was not really feeling too excited about international travel, and I said, “Well, I know of new technologies coming online to fix that.” In fact, when we decided to get married, I put in an order for this robot that I knew wouldn’t be delivered until a month or so before the wedding, and so we have one of the very first ever telepresent machines ever made, that was used at our wedding.
We got married at this old castle, and this old castle had no internet, and so we actually got a hold of the company Orange, which is one of the biggest phone companies in Europe, and we expressed to them what we were trying to do, and they said, “Look, if you’ll let us market that we helped you guys pull this off, we will provide you internet for this day.” Which they did. So they actually ran internet to the castle and put wireless out in the hundred acres of gardens out behind it so that my mother could roam freely both through the wedding itself and then the after party. Some of our favorite pictures are of people dancing with her on the dance floor during and after the wedding.
I guess, for people who don’t know, what does this robot actually look like? It’s sort of a Segway, right?
We have three different models now, but they generally have the same form factor, which is a small base underneath that’s about the size of a toolbox, that is a self-balancing mechanism with two wheels, and a telescoping pole that goes up the center, and then on top is the communications head, so you have a display monitor so that other people can see you, and microphones where you can pick up what’s happening in the other room. When it’s on my screen here, you just use your arrow keys and mouse to drive it around, so other than the fact you can’t open doors for yourself, it’s a mighty good way to virtually be there.
It doesn’t have any sort of arm, does it? To press elevator buttons or anything like that?
It does not. In fact, I keep looking to see when somebody is going to make one, and no one even has that in the queue that I can see yet. The other problem with elevators is that they tend to cut off wireless connections because they’re metal boxes. We’ve actually tried to hook 4G modems onto these devices and drive them around, and you can drive around outdoors with a 4G modem, but elevators are still a hard journey to go into just because of the complexity of pressing the button and disconnecting.
Why don’t you tell us what’s ahead for Shroud of the Avatar? Where do you hope the project goes in the next couple of years?
Our sector is set on the end of this year, which is getting the “Forsaken Virtues” release out—that first whole story and the first whole continent. But, as is the case with massive-multiplayer-style games, we hope and trust that it will live on for many years. With the modest few million dollars that we’re building Episode One out of, that’s to kind of get the sandbox built and the first stories told, but as the game expands, we’re going to do things, like, you’ll see ships in Episode One, but they’re all tied onto the docks. You don’t get to sail them around much. You’ll see whether it’s flying vehicles or the implication of future flying vehicles. You’ll see whole new groups of character classes to be played. The stories of this first one involve a fairly limited palette of kinds of creatures and circumstances. All of those things will be expanded in Episodes Two, Three, Four, and Five. If we get through Episode Five, if we’re fortunate enough to live through the full arc of five episodes, then I think we will be about as happy as you can be, and then we’ll decide what’s next.
How many people does it take to sail a ship? I was curious about that.
Right now you can’t because they’re all tied to the docks. But that will come in Episode Two. Honestly, we haven’t even begun to design the strategy yet for how easy or difficult it will be to navigate your vessel across the seas.
Cool. So if people are interested in Shroud of the Avatar, what websites or things should they be checking out?
Www.shroudoftheavatar.com is where you can come, and I’d be very excited to have more people join us on this adventure to kind of both hearken back to an earlier day of series games like Ultima, as well as take a bold step into the future of trying to create a new type of massively multiplayer game with a new type of way to interact with characters and quests that we hope will be well-liked and carry us into the future.
Great! Unfortunately we’re pretty much out of time here, so I guess we should probably start wrapping this up. Richard, I just really want to thank you, it’s sort of a lifelong dream for me to get to talk to you.
Thank you, David. My pleasure, absolutely.
Thanks for all the Ultima games and I’m really looking forward to Shroud of the Avatar. Best of luck with it.
Thank you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is produced by John Joseph Adams and hosted by: David Barr Kirtley, who is the author of thirty short stories, which have appeared in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and Lightspeed, in books such as Armored, The Living Dead, Other Worlds Than These, and Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and on podcasts such as Escape Pod and Pseudopod. He lives in New York.
ARTIST GALLERY: UDARA CHINTHAKA
Udara Chinthaka works as a digital artist, illustrator, and matte painter for games and websites. He lives and works in Colombo, Sri Lanka. His website is udarachinthaka.com.
[To view the gallery, turn the page.]
ARTIST SPOTLIGHT: UDARA CHINTHAKA
Henry Lien
You’re from Sri Lanka: Tell us about the tradition of science fiction/fantasy art and illustration in Sri Lanka. Does it have a flavor that is distinct from art and illustration coming out of India or elsewhere in South Asia? How would you describe the difference?
Sri Lanka has a rich heritage of art and culture strongly influenced by our neighbor India. Ancient Lanka was influenced by different forms of art from different eras of Indian history and therefore a lot of it still remains in our art styles. One can find the influence of Indian art in Sri Lankan art, from colour to brush strokes. However, Sri Lankan art has a tendency to show more subtle blends in colour tones, as opposed to the harsh brightness in colour found in Indian art. Indian art is known to feature more tones of red, whereas Sri Lankan art tends to blend in shades of brown to make the colour schemes seem more neutral. In addition, with the numerous invasions by nations such as the Dutch and Portuguese, Sri Lankan art has been strongly influenced by cultures other than India and evolved to blend in all these cultures.
Many of the characters in your work feature super-deformed dimensions on the characters, yet they look very different from Japanese super-deformed anime/manga characters. Are you consciously trying to achieve a different look and is this part of a larger Sri Lankan/South Asian traditional of drawing?
My work is mainly based in historical and contemporary Sri Lankan styles of art. I spent my childhood watching anime, manga, and cartoons, including Japanese examples. However, my style wasn’t directly influenced by the Japanese styles. I am consciously trying to achieve my own style of illustration while blending in the color schemes of my country’s heritage.
What about the issue of race in your works? Western viewers who are used to seeing only Western and Japanese illustration might look at the characters in works like the girl in the red dress in Evil Soul and the scientist with the frog in New Species and glance over them assuming they are white, when in fact, on closer examination, they appear to be of South Asian heritage. Do you consciously consider the race of your characters when you draw them? Or does it depend on the project?
I do not tend to use color differentiation in skin tone to define the race of the characters I paint. That said, my art generally portrays the people of the region of Asia that I am from, as I was raised with a strong sense of Sinhalese culture here in Sri Lanka.
The character in Evil Soul was necessarily South Asian because this piece was specifically portraying a character who still engages in ancient Sri Lankan folkloric ma
gical traditions, as are still practiced in rural parts of my country. In New Species, I tried to emphasize the more cartoonish side of my work. That is the reason for the somewhat brighter skin tone. Also, I think that my childhood spent watching Warner Brothers and Loony Tunes cartoons seeps in in unintentional assumptions about what color schemes to use to represent human skin when working in a cartoon style.
It is clear from your work that you are not afraid to interject wild color schemes into your work. Several of your works are blue and orange, a color combination that sounds garish on paper, but creates a sense of vibrancy and excitement in the actual works. It seems almost like you are saying, “What is the most unlikely color scheme I can think of and how can I make it work?” Are these color challenges that you throw at yourself, just to see if you can do it?
I do not consciously plan out a specific color theme, but just go with the flow of my thoughts and get drowned in my art. As I continue to work on a piece, I start to understand what points in the piece I want to emphasize. I will often use an unusual color to draw the viewer’s eye toward that area of the piece and make sure it stands out from the rest.
A large part of your work is images for younger viewers. Were these projects for games, books, or other products for younger players?
My work does not specifically target a certain audience, it is more an expression of what I watch, see, imagine and am drawn towards personally.
Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 50 Page 27
