Social role-playing game Velvet Sundown lets you solve thong-related mysteries

Making realistic human characters for games isn’t easy. Helsinki-based Tribe Studios has spent the last four years figuring out how to do it with a game engine dubbed Dramagame. In the past couple of weeks, Tribe has released its first title, Velvet Sundown, which is based on the Dramagame technology.

The free-to-play release is a social multiplayer role-playing game that can be tailored to its audience’s tastes, however wacky or lewd they might be. Velvet Sundown takes a bunch of characters and puts them on a luxury yacht cruising the waters of the fictitious Caribbean state of Balbonia.

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It is not like the unconstrained virtual world of Second Life, where players can create any story or character or place they want. Rather, Tribe Studios has built everything in this little episode, which is like a 3D-animated version of the board game Clue. You don’t design your character. You choose characters from the selection that the developer provides. Anywhere from four to 11 real people can play.

I met Elina Arponen, founder of Tribe Studios, at the Slush conference in Helsinki last year, as her team was finishing their project. They raised more than $1.2 million in angel and Finnish government money. Velvet Sundown is available on Valve’s Steam digital distribution service on the PC, and it has about 70,000 users so far.

“We’re trying to take the game industry in new directions,” Arponen said.

Unfortunately, you can’t fit 70,000 people on a yacht. So Velvet Sundown creates “instances” of the ship for each batch of players. Individuals can join different scenarios. I played one dubbed Fathers and Sons, and I entered the game as the beautiful female journalist Linda, who is hot to get a scoop about a new kind of illicit drug. As soon as I entered the game, a guy named Ingmar made lewd advances toward me and struck me a few times with a taser. He swore at me and moved on.

I went on to talk with Boyle, Mary, and Alex. I got the scoop on Alex and his drug habit, and I took some pictures of the guests. They offered me vodka, and I proceeded to drink it with my fingers around an imaginary cup, which clearly is a bug in the game. I flirted with Boyle, and then, Ingmar came back in. I wanted to exit the group conversation, so I pressed exit. I then proceeded to exit the game altogether. It was an inauspicious start.

Some people are posting ridiculous fan videos about their experiences. The video below shows a player acting out Alex’s search for the owner of a thong (underwear).

The game is social. There’s no fighting or leveling up. You can work toward achieving various personal goals as you speak with the other participants. The ending for the scenario can play out in different ways. You never know how people are going to behave, but you can generally expect them to behave badly.

“It’s sort of like Second Life meets Monkey Island,” Arponen said. “In our game, you can have an instant adventure. You can think of it as a massively multiplayer online dungeon experience, with a different setting.”

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The game took four years to make because the team of seven people went through a lot of iterations on the technology. Now, it will be easier to create a variety of Velvet Sundown scenarios and move on to new types of games.

“Our next game will be something else, when the characters and settings change,” Arponen said.

Velvet Sundown is free-to-play. Over time, you’ll be able to buy new games or scenarios.

Some bugs need addressing, Arponen acknowledged. The range of facial animations isn’t great enough yet, she said.

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And so far, nothing is stopping people from behaving in an explicit way.

“There’s party content on the yacht, with booze and romance on board,” Arponen said. “You can take it to extremes. That’s up to the players.”

The trouble, as I discovered, is that some people want to solve a mystery and achieve goals, while others want X-rated dialogue. Tribe Studios is going to have a heck of a time sorting out such dilemmas.

Over time, Arponen would love to see middleware that tracks your own facial movements and maps them to the characters in the experience. But that’s probably a long way off. The tech isn’t particularly impressive compared to the performance-captured characters in single-player games like The Last of Us. But that’s one of the sacrifices you make in creating emergent gameplay, Arponen said.

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Still, Velvet Sundown is an interesting experiment, and not much else like it exists in the market.

“We’ll take our inspiration from the community,” Arponen said.

The video below shows some of the comic entertainment you can get from the game. But it’s definitely not safe for work.