Seed Interview
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Q: The NPCs play an intricate part in the story. Can you tell us about the emotional models and language machine used to create the Artificial Intelligence?
A: The NPCs all have a set of emotional states they can be in, changing the way they talk, react to interactions and emotes, vote, ask and give favors etc. As such, the emotional engine in itself is a state machine with a little extra. The language machine was originally intended to provide a text based interface for talking to the NPCs. Various focus testing feedback, and development resource constraints have forced us to put that aspect a little on the backburner for now. For now, we concentrate on using the language machine (under the hood) to provide very dynamic and structured emergent events for the story system. Thus, when a player e.g. repairs a broken service hatch, this can generate an event the story system can use to start or move forward a story. Also, the NPCs can react to these events directly. Later, we anticipate slowly adding the most interesting language features to the NPC interface, in order to make NPC interaction even more interesting than it is right now.
They've also posted five exclusive screenshots to give us an idea of how the game is looking so far.
