Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

A line of kilns, each puffing a different pastel color of smoke, rings Game Designer Björn Johannessen’s puritanoid character.  “The disco smoke – that’s probably not going to be there in the final version,” he jokes. Björn is showing me a brick production chain in Salem, his nascent studio’s second title, and the first done as a professional project, complete with funding and a fearless publisher, Paradox Interactive.

Brickmaking is serious work in a crafting MMORPG rooted in emergent and cooperative (or competitive) behavior. In Björn’s first project, Haven & Hearth, done while he and Lead Programmer Frederic Tolf were undergrads at a Swedish university, bricks became currency. “In Haven, bricks have all the characteristics of a good currency. They’re portable, divisible, and durable.” Not to mention, bricks are infinitely more useful, in an early colonial world, than bank notes.


If you find yourself wondering why Seatribe wouldn’t just layer in a economy, complete with its own currency, then maybe you haven’t discovered the magic, joy, and frequent frustration of emergent gameplay as popularized by Minecraft. The idea is to give players a framework (production chains, materials, etc.) and allow them to interact with their environment, introducing external threats and economies of scale to drive cooperative behavior.

While Seatribe’s Haven actually preceded Minecraft by almost a year, it’s top-down perspective and online-only, open source framework attracted only a niche audience instead of Notch’s comparative riches and fame. But that was enough to empower Seatribe’s dynamic duo to create Salem. Not a bad gig right out of school.

Character Art Evolved

In our January first-look, we revealed some of Salem’s most popular selling points – permadeath and character persistence through items (i.e. once your character is dead, he/she is dead, but his/her progress can be inherited through item ownership by a new relative just off the boat), it’s socio-economic sandboxy nature, and cultural repercussions of using magic, which is an “intensely individualized” way to succeed at a neighbor’s expense. The positive response Björn got from this article and other coverage, combined with Paradox’s support, allowed Seatribe to contract out for higher quality art for the game, as seen with the evolving character art below:

Character Development Evolved

After Björn showed us how characters had evolved visually, I was curious about how these characters will evolve in-game. Details were sketchy at the January reveal, and Seatribe didn’t seem like a studio that would settle for a conventional RPG level-up scheme. They didn’t.

Food is central to progress in Salem, as befits its loosely historical bent, and character development revolves around the four slightly humorous “humours”, or bodily fluids: blood (hitpoints), phlegm (non-combat stamina – for chopping trees, digging clay, etc.), yellow bile (combat stamina, also used for advanced crafting), and black bile (used for intellectual pursuits, such as learning a new skill). For example, to learn the “mountaineering” skill to escape the steep inclines surrounding the newbie area, for example, you’ll have to spend some black bile. This can only be replenished by eating the right food.


Learning skills is one way to progress in Salem. The other is something Björn calls the “gluttony system.” When a player’s humours are fully replenished, that player can activate the “god fork” to enter gluttony mode. This mode is a minigame, with the objective of pushing a humour past a certain limit by eating a variety of food.

But gluttony isn’t just an easy way to level up at the expense of your food stores. Björn explained: “The problem is, food replenishes individual humors randomly, and the random chance is based on the quality of the food. The time and benefit of each dish varies, and the meters recede over time… But the higher the quality of the food, the more predictable the humor it will fill." So what’s the secret? “Have a lavish meal prepared. The better the food, the more accurately you can plan the amount of food needed.” And the more you level your humours, the more work you can do, enemies you can fight, and skills you can learn.