It’s more than 5,000 names long, from around the world. The generative AI part–one thing that you may do is, we have a list of last names. You can really go specific it the way you want. Within the small village in England, we don’t call it soda. Also, you can change the dialect locally. But for example, if you wanted to make Life By You’s town be like the town that I’m from, a small village in England, or the town a player from Brazil is from, a small village in Brazil, then you can go in and make the people look like the way they look in your community. It may not sound sexy at all compared to a modeler doing it. The tech space content is an example where you can use generative AI. Players can bring in content in any way they want. Humble: The way that we look at it is, we are making an open world life simulator. GamesBeat: Did you think about making use of generative AI before this whole craze took off? But as you can see, all of these things that I can scroll down–I can also change every aspect of their personalities, all live. Humble: Yeah! Not only that, but you can add people on the fly, drop new people in, and they’re pre-generated out of whatever parameters you set in the global menu. GamesBeat: Switching players reminds me a little of Watch Dogs. You can decorate all you want in Life By You. It was allowing the players to play their game their way with as little friction as we could get. “I want to play Cecily here,” or whatever her name is. It’s that easy, rather than having to load up a separate saved game. You can play their life permanently if you want, or just temporarily, and move them around. You get access to all their memories, all their loves and dislikes, all their social relationships. As you go in the world and see anybody, you can right-click on them and play them. You can follow them there and watch them do their work. When you see somebody go to work and go into a building, they really go to work. That’s a key difference for any life simulator. Humble: Every person in the world is always being simulated, even when you’re not looking. GamesBeat: Is it more like a city sim as well, then? It’s actually simulated simultaneously globally as well. It’s not just an open world in terms of a physical open world. It would be hard to retrofit this kind of tech into an existing game. That helped develop the whole game from the start. We knew we were going to let you customize everything. We knew from day one that this was going to be an open world. Humble: It was designed from the ground up. GamesBeat: Was there some technology along the way that helped you accomplish that? Things the older generations of games don’t have? We want a game that feels free and low-friction to play. We want to empower people and have them be free to tell the stories they want to tell. You can set up the world the way you want to reflect your community. We can directly control people as well as control in third person. I wanted to work on a game with colleagues where we had a shared vision, really emphasizing freedom. Rod Humble: I’m a life sim player myself. GamesBeat: What motivated you to go back to this space? Rod Humble is head of Life by You studio Paradox Tectonic. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview. I spoke with Humble at the Game Developers Conference last week in San Francisco. The studio has veteran game development talent dedicated to building games that enable creativity, freedom, emotion, and sharing. Paradox Interactive created Paradox Tectonic in 2019. You can live the life of one or tell the stories of many. You can drag and drop your humans into their place - or drive them directly in third-person mode. You can live your life to the fullest or break the rules as you see fit. The idea is to deliver a huge amount of customization as well as privacy as players work out fantasies and other things that they can’t really experiment with in the real world, Humble said.
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