Felshina: One of the new features in this Telling is the addition of Challenges. Can you tell me a little about these? How/why were they created?

Andrew Tepper: They're not yet complete - we've only implemented four or five of them so far. The reason we added them was that although the majority of players complete citizenship (currently, almost 50% of new players complete citizenship) they really didn't know where to go next. What we discovered a month or two ago was that the biggest problem people had immersing themselves in the game occurred during that time after citizenship where you know the mechanics of the game - you know how to build stuff and plant things and the reason that you would visit a university to learn skills and so on - but you don't quite know what to do next and you haven't yet made many friends and that's it's a really hard transition. It's what a mentor should do - not just be a human instruction manual - but get people integrated into the game and it's both difficult to explain and to do well.

Our thinking was that since citizenship worked so well, why not give some challenges beyond citizenship of exactly the same format and simply give people more time to meet other players and have formal parts of the challenges be "meet a person like this". So, if you did the Culinary challenge you would need to meet a gastronome or if you did Recreational Fishing you would need to meet a local fisherman and there are a couple of things that say 'meet the locals' for help, and Meet the People challenge is of course full of those "challenges".

Felshina: Do you have to be a paying customer to do a challenge?

Andrew Tepper: No, but probably something I can do is have a bonus challenge available only to people who have paid for the game.

Felshina: Is there a reward for these?

Andrew Tepper: Right now there is no reward and technically, though technically there could be rewards for them. But it's a little bit against the spirit of ATITD to give physical items as a reward. Early on we never did that, now we do it occasionally, but I don't like to give big stuff. I don't like to make the Universities or schools too much of a vending machine. We do have a bunch of graphics of different kinds of medals that I may assemble into a kind of prize rack for completing challenges.

Felshina: Do you intend to add more challenges in the future?

Andrew Tepper: Yes, they are very easy to add. Typically, it's only an hour or two to create and implement a whole new challenge, so I'm going to keep adding these.

Felshina: One of your initial goals for Tale 2 was to make it more casual-player friendly. Do you feel you've achieved this?

Andrew Tepper: Yes, it's more casual player friendly, but I still see a disconnect between the casual and hardcore players. In Tale 1, looking at the exit poll (when people leave the game a poll comes up and asks them the main reason) it was 9 "too overwhelming" to every one person who said "not enough to do." So, overall, people were overwhelmed by Tale 1. In Tale 2, it is 4 to 3 (four people saying it is too hard, three saying there isn't wasn't enough to do). In Tale 1 I released a whole slew of content early on. I'm actually thinking that in Tale 3 I might go back to more of the Tale 1 style where people get a bit overwhelmed at first. But, it's a difficult balance to find because some people are driven at way by being at one extreme and others are driven away at the other. So, is it more casual friendly? The numbers say yes, the game has shifted (compared to Tale 1) toward being more casual friendly.

Felshina: How do the Chariots factor into this?

Andrew Tepper: In Tale 1 the hardcore players wouldn't mind doing these monster runs to get places (20, 30, even 40 minutes) but for the most part in Tale 2 we put in Chariot Stops to help with travel across Egypt. I hear very little if any complaining about travel time. When I do get requests like, "Hey can you put a warp point for this Fireworks festival?" I look how far a run it is from the chariot stop and its maybe 3-4 minutes…people are no longer doing these monster runs for the most part. And that's good, because it really was boring. And yes, it makes it more casual friendly so that you can spend your time doing the fun stuff instead of running.

Felshina: What inspired you to implement the new herb feature?

Andrew Tepper: We're doing (did) a talk at GDC this year about our development philosophy, which I call "bottom up." We implement a new basic game design feature with no ultimate purpose and then figure out all kinds of ways to use it. For example, the Challenges system is a new basic feature in the system and so far we've built a few Challenges and used it to do citizenship. I'm sure that in the rest of Tale 2 and through the course of Tale 3 that will grow and be used a lot.

For herbs, the new technology that my partner Josh came up with this new vegetation rendering system, and his goals were that he wanted to have very lush plants that wouldn't chew up server resources; could really decorate an area nicely; and have them all be functional and not just backdrop but really functional stuff that doesn't chew up a lot of resources. What he developed with was this rendering system and a way to differentiate what you click on including a function for a select few players to make up new plant types by entering about a zillion parameters. Dria (one of the players) is an expert at this. She's created two or three hundred plant types now.

Felshina: Are all of those herbs?

Andrew Tepper: No, the same system does herbs, wood bearing trees, and most anything that appears as a cluster of plants. I told Dria to try and keep her creations in the following styles: herbs, wood bearing, decorative and thorn bearing. From that I just wrote code for it to do interesting things with the different categories. But basically, that's our Bottom Up philosophy where you create a basic function, and then figure out how to use it. You get so much more content then a top down approach where the developer says, "Now I want to have an animal running around and here's how it should work," and guys all go do the programming to make this happen. You design based on the technology you come up with, rather then invent the technology to fit a design.

Felshina: Do you feel that there is too large a variety of herbs, too little, or just right?

Andrew Tepper: I don't think there can be too many! People do tell me that they get to recognize the common species and know how to harvest them, but if you don't recognize one you can go outside the game or experiment if you find something weird. It's not so much the number of herbs - I mean we could have ten thousand herbs, if 80% of the time you recognize the herb, and 20% of the time it's just "something else," it doesn't matter what that something else is, be it one of one hundred or one of one thousand.

Felshina: Some of the fansites (wiki.atitd.net, neologic.net/atitd/herbs) are very helpful with identifying the herbs, aren't they?

Andrew Tepper: Yes. And I wonder if we did have a thousand or two thousand herbs - the system can handle 3500 easily enough - but I wonder if that would be too much to even look up on the Wiki. But yeah, I'm real happy with how herbs turned out.

Felshina: You also recently changed the Body Initiation to a hunt for plants, and added a feature to examine non-herbs. Does this feature serve any other use besides the Body Initiation?

Andrew Tepper: That whole 'examine this plant' business is actually because I was refining the newbie experience. They arrive on an island at the top of a mountain and I wanted everything they encounter to have some menu item just so it looks complete. For example, the benches now have an option to "sit down on this bench." But all it does is say "you don't have time to sit down, you have to become a Citizen!" The thing that bugs me about all MUDs is the very flowery description - it's like playing a book where I can pick up anything - but then it turns out that nothing that was referenced has any function to it. That's always the thing that drove me crazy about MUDs and totally turned me off of them - that it was very thin and I hate that about games - where there are descriptions or pretty graphics but it doesn't do anything. So, when I played through the initiation recently, there were a couple of things that were there but you couldn't do anything with and it just bugged me so I went through and added different menu items to decorative plants, benches, welcome banners, and a few other things.

Felshina: While we're on the topic of the newbie experience, what made you change the newbie experience to a longer and more in-depth experience?

Andrew Tepper: Just the whole idea that people, when they have a list of goals to accomplish, are very motivated. It's good to get them to stick around and meet some people and find areas of the game that really interest them. The motivation is to keep people around longer until they are integrated into the game.

Felshina: Do you think that having the tutorial signs takes away the personal mentoring touch?

Andrew Tepper: Yes. It's a necessary evil. If there were enough mentors so that we didn't need to have any signs, and there were mentors waiting up there, it would be a much better system. Signs are very much not in the spirit of ATITD but it's kind of a necessary evil as we're short on mentors and we do want people to join the community and that was one compromise we had to make.

Felshina: What exactly is a mentor's role now, then?

Andrew Tepper: As I said before, the real purpose of a mentor is to be that first friend in Egypt to help integrate you into the game. It is now more focused on that specifically, and less on being a human instruction manual. When the mentor's role was less defined - when it was an act of "get this person through citizenship" - we did have problems with some mentors simply walking people through the basics: "come over here, click on that button, click on the brick rack, pick it up." They would just do this very robotic mentoring. Not most people, but the people who did that would often do dozens of players in the hopes receiving perhaps 1 shrine from 20 new players. All well and good, you received a shrine, but you just turned off 19 people! So, ask me again in six months what I think about the changes. But for now I believe this is a little better.

Felshina: The new glass blowing skills are amazing! What made you revise it for this tale?

Andrew Tepper: Well, I blow glass in real life.

Felshina: Did you do that before you decided to add it to ATITD?

Andrew Tepper: Right at the same time. It's something I've always had an interest in, and Josh and I designed the glass blowing a little bit more top-down then we usually do, because I said that I would really like to have a glass blowing skill in the game.

We brainstormed different mathematical models for that, and at the same time I took a glass blowing class. I know we did a very good job capturing the feel of real life glass blowing, because when I sit there at the game and I'm thinkink "turn, turn, turn, turn, turn," that whole feeling of "got to keep it turning" is exactly what goes through your mind when you are really doing glass blowing - because if the glass sags too much, the piece is ruined.

Felshina: So are you a good glass blower in game?

Andrew Tepper: I'm alright. I'm not great. In real life, I'm just taking the 2nd class, but it turns out I'm actually a pretty good glass blower - when I finished the first class, they asked me to teach the next semester as a teaching assistant. I do that once a week at the glass center in Pittsburg - you could say I have a kind of have a knack for it in real life, but in the game there are players who are much better then I am.

Blacksmithing is another skill which I think has a decent feel, but I've never done real life blacksmithing. I know about wine tastings…I'm into wine in real life. I have a group of friends and once a month we do serious wine tastings and once a year it will be my turn to put on a tasting at my expense for the rest of the group. We'll sit around and have ten or twelve wines and each person will give a critical evaluation of wine. How you learn to taste wines in real life: you first start tasting and saying "Oh, that's kind of fruity," or "This tastes like wood," (These are both good things in wine). As you start to taste more wines you say "Well, it's kind of a citrus fruity-flavor I'm tasting." And then as you taste more wine you can pick out the taste of lemon peels. So the in-game wine tasting system is modeled on that specific progression where you taste general flavors - fruity, woody, resin, herblike, vegetable like, oxidized - and then more specific versions of them so that it kind of forms a tree. It's all based on something called the UC Davis wine aroma wheel. That's another skill that absolutely has the feel of a real life thing, and I'm very happy with how it turned out.

Felshina: You gave a lot of power to players in letting them create the seven new tests this Tale. Are you happy with the results?

Andrew Tepper: Yes. However the one thing I didn't conceive of was that it was harder to code from other people's designs as opposed to simply changing the design to make it easier to code. Because of this, it's taking me longer to actually implement them, but that's alright. I think it's so important that there's meaning to being an Oracle, it's not just a prize and then "Kk, now everyone try again." You're really putting your stamp on the whole history of ATITD.

Felshina: Do you intend to one day have all the tests be player created?

Andrew Tepper: No. I don't want to ever say "No, I'm not creating anymore tests," just because I like doing that. I think that there will always be both player-created and Teppy-created tests.

Felshina: As for the designs of the player tests, were you really impressed with them?

Andrew Tepper: Yes, I think they range between good and brilliant. I'm not going to say which I think are merely good, just to not insult the Oracles. But there's not a bad one in the bunch. Yokir, for example, is fantastic…it just has a nice feel to sit down and get a feel for playing it. Test of the Host, not a lot of people have done that yet, but it will be interesting to see how that works. In that one the difficulty is not self-balancing, so it will be interesting to see if the Oracle got the difficulty right there.

Felshina: Has anyone passed the Test of the Host yet?

Andrew Tepper: No.

Felshina: Which has been the hardest to code so far?

Andrew Tepper: The Test of the Safari, just because there will be seven different pieces to it. It's almost like seven mini-tests.

Felshina: Crossbreeding recently became available, as well as crossbreed-able flowers through an event. How scientific is this feature? How about beetles-do they use the same system?

Andrew Tepper: It's not too distantly related from real life genetics. I actually don't know how plant DNA works in real life, but with animal DN, when crossbreeding, an entire chromazome will express itself at a time.

Felshina: If you were a player, what discipline would you follow?

Andrew Tepper: Leadership. I mean, that's the discipline I fantasize about playing! At the end of Tale 1 I actually tried to play the Test of the Covered Cartouche, but with building the game to make Tale 2 ready and the completing the tests wrap up Tale 1, I just didn't have time to really do it. Someday, though, I'll try it…though I probably won't have time to try it with Tale 3 coming up and Alvin Maker.