Grow Your Own

In a tiny indie studio in Berlin, a deep simulation MMO is forming the next big virtual world.

- Mundi Vondi

Community is an important concept for Klang Games. Little wonder: there are just 13 staff working on the studio’s latest and most ambitious title, Seed. Massively multiplayer online games are famously time-consuming development projects, but the team at Klang is looking to have its new simulation MMO finished in just two years. It’s quite the goal, considering its complexity. At first, our demo appears to be Runescape’s more stylish sibling, with a tight-knit colony of tiny citizens breaking rocks and chopping wood in a charmingly low-poly forest. Then we notice the stat breakdown for one of them. ‘Blood filtration’ certainly wasn’t a factor in The Sims.

As that implies, Klang is committed to creating a detailed human simulation. “We started thinking about this game probably ten years ago,” CEO Mundi Vondi tells us. “We were always obsessed with making the next deep, immersive MMO – the ultimate MMO.” Vondi’s co-founders previously worked at CCP Games, and so the starting point for Seed was, inevitably, the Icelandic studio’s space bound MMO Eve Online. “The way we started to think was, ‘How can we make this game more persistent, more accessible and easier to play for people who don’t normally have eight hours a day to spare?’” The answer to their question lay in Improbable’s remarkable SpatialOS, previously featured in E306.