It would be far too easy to look at CardLife and say ‘oh, so this is a knock off of Minecraft.’ Not only would you be wrong, but you’d also be dismissing the hard work of FreeJam, the studio behind the cardboard world of CardLife.

During EGX 2018, I was lucky enough to sit down with Communication Manager Andy Griffiths and talk more about what CardLife had to offer.

Below you’ll discover what makes it different from Minecraft, what the plans are for the future and just how the community has shaped CardLife for the better.

Aimee Hart: It’s great to meet you Andy, and thank you for taking the time to talk to me and VGR about CardLife. So, could you tell me more about what CardLife is about?

Andy Griffiths: CardLife is a survival game where everything is made of cardboard. Everything is 100% edible and customizable. Our main selling point, and what makes us different from say, Minecraft, is our connect the dot system. Essentially everything is connected to that system, so when you spawn in for the first time you get to create your own character through freehand with the mouse. You can create your legs, head, mouth, etc. Because it’s freehand, you’re able to customize things however you see fit.

When you spawn into the world of CardLife you’re completely naked, you’ve got zero resources. So we introduce players to this world slowly through the Journal, which suggests you cut down trees to get wood so you can create an axe, etc and you just slowly, but not too slowly, progress throughout the game.

But it’s a really fun game to work on, our community is great. There are about 20,000 people playing the game and they always make things that we don’t expect. So we’ve got our customization system with connecting the dots, but we’ve also got a massive building system where you can build almost anything you want. We’ve had people made mini-cities, towns, skyscrapers that dominate over towns and the like. It really is a fun game to work on, just to see what our community will come up with.

AG: At the moment we’re still in Alpha, but we hope to launch on Steam Early Access in October this year. What we’re trying to do is invite people to be on this development journey with us. So at FreeJam Studios [the team behind CardLife], we’re different to other studios that we release things really, really early. We believe that when you’re developing something there’s no point carrying it on until you know it’s going to be a success until you know what people like about it.

So we released the Alpha about two years ago and we had people coming in slowly but surely. These were all of our founders, that was essentially important to us and the game really early on because we listened to them all the time through feedback on the forums and Discord. Within reason, of course.

But around about two months ago we took the game off sale because there were quite a few bugs in the game that we really wanted to fix. Now we’re on Steam it allowed us to have a ‘Coming Soon’ page, so we’re asking as many people who are interested to Wishlist the game as much as they can so we can have a big launch in October.

AM: When I played CardLife a few minutes ago, it really stood out to me how much life there is in a world that’s made of cardboard.

AG: It was all thanks to our CO, Mark Simmons. He developed a 3D modeling tool, which was aimed at kids because he wanted to show his son a part of what his job was by letting him see what 3d modeling was in a very basic way. So, he developed a tech demo in his spare time and it was a first-person environment, completely blank, with three massive tools in it.

These were a stamp, scissors, and cardboard and essentially you would use these tools to create different things, so you’d use scissors to cut around the cardboard and vice versa. Your finished piece would then spawn blue in the world, and you’d be able to mix it with the template and watch it come together through animation.

AH: That is ridiculously cool.

AG: Yeah! We all looked at that at the studio and was like ‘we need to make a game around this’. So, that’s essentially what we did. I mean, our lead designer Rich has always been a massive fan of MMO’s and survival games, so he played a lot of those. And obviously, you know, Minecraft [laughs].

So we looked at Minecraft and we looked at Ark and we wanted to be something that was a little bit in between. We wanted the accessibility of Minecraft, but the PVP and craziness of Ark as well. At the moment I’d say we’re still in that Minecraft-like phase where we’re still in the pre-historic, stone age game-wise. There are not many scientific elements in CardLife right now. We did just add the bow and arrow.

But there are lots of things we’ll be adding, like mounts. We’ll be doing all of this stuff, we just need to figure out when it is the best time to do it.

AG: We put out a list of everything we want to do, and put it out to the community. We’ve been doing this since Day 1. So if you go to the CardLife website, you’ll see a list of all the features that we want to add. That list is never changed, mostly because we never really see the need to change it because a lot of the time the ideas that people give us, not all of the time, but sometimes, are ideas we’re eager to implement in the first place. If players are telling us that they want the things we want too, clearly it’s a good idea, right?

We do try to give people as much of a heads up as we can give them when we’re adding/changing things because our community is great. They pick holes and everything, but that’s a good thing because it helps us become better developers. They don’t do it in a malicious way either, say in comparison to Robocraft which is more competitive and the attention is more on weapon details, etc.

We also do little 3D models, just to check that they are actually workable in real life. Not all of them are. We do take some liberties with that, but most of them are. Fire torches for example…

AH: Yes! How did that work out?

AG: Basically… We can’t figure out how to do it! So we did it the way Minecraft did it, so if you have a burnable piece of cardboard you can use it as a torch. Only we don’t have dual-wielding right now, so you can’t mine and hold the torch at the same time. We are going to figure that out in the future, as it changes a lot of the dynamic we’ve already built.

AH: Right, like you could wield two pickaxes and just go ham?

AG: Exactly!

AH: Can you tell me more about CardLife’s narrative? Is there one?

AG: We do have an overarching narrative at the moment, which is kind of related to the Tree of Life. So you’re progressing through all these different biomes of human history. As I said, you’re in the Stone Age at the moment, but you’ll be progressing into the industrial age and then WW1, it’ll then progress to modern day and even go into the future.

From a technical perspective, we are still figuring out how that’s going to work. Our Lead Designer knows how it’s going to work out narratively, he’s got maps planned out and everything. It could be that you get to the end of the island and you have to fight a boss, you defeat that boss and you go through a portal that then takes you to a new one. It could be that way, or it could be something completely different.

We are big fans of emergent storytelling, which happens when players meet other players and how they interact with one another. But we also like environmental base storytelling, like you see in games like Left 4 Dead. Sure you can just focus on shooting zombies, but when you go to safe houses there’s a lot of writing on the wall and things like that which gives you context to the universe you’re in. I think if we were to add more of a story to CardLife, it would be something more environment based rather than the typical story you find in other games.

AH: What about functionality in CardLife? Modding and such?

AG: Minecraft is possibly one of the biggest modding platforms out there, and in my opinion, it wouldn’t be as big as it is without the use of modding. We want CardLife to be as big as that, which is a pretty lofty aspiration to hear, but we want to get as close as possible to Minecraft’s success. So when we started development again, we made sure that all the core game properties that we have were accessible for players to edit with Notepad. We want to add more of that functionality to the game as well.

As you saw with the connect the dot system, when you go outside of the game to edit components like your player’s face and body through Photoshop or whatever, as long as you pick the right file, when you log back on you’ll see that your change is represented in-game.

We’re also looking at Steam Workshop integration to try and make modding a little bit easier. Even so, we’ve had players create mods that deactivate the hunger system, gives you unlimited stamina and, weirdly enough, people making coffins in games. For some reason or other [laughs]. We’ve also got Creative Mode, where you have everything you could possibly want in the game to just let you be free and do whatever you want.

AH: CardLife seems to be very much ‘your game’ then.

AG: Yes, for definite. I think it’s something a lot of early access developers miss. As soon as you release a game, it is as much as the community’s as it is yours. To have an active dialogue with your community, to tell them what you’re going to do before you can fund serious resources into it, it can help you a lot. What’s more, they can even give you bigger and better ideas. After all, when you’re a 25 person development team versus 20,000, the mindshare is fantastic.

When we launch on Steam next month we’ve already got plans and we’re working towards completing them, as well as fixing any bugs that are there. But you know, as soon as we launch on Steam then things will change. People could say ‘oh it’s great you’re doing this, but could you do this instead?’ and we’ll gladly pivot if that’s what the community seems to want. We’re just very excited to see what’s going to happen next, that kind of thing.

One thing we’re sure of is that we want our community, whether from Early Access or Day 1, to be part of our development journey and, hopefully, our success. Together we’ll make a better game.

AH: So would you say that you owe quite a lot to the community?

AG: We wouldn’t be here without them. It was they who suggest things like ‘Creative Mode’, and it’s been one of the most successful parts of CardLife. We hadn’t even thought of that idea, but once we saw that forum post we wanted to help include it. We do try and listen as much as possible, but that doesn’t mean we do everything our community wants us to do because we have development priorities and other things to look at.

AH: Okay, so say I’m terrible at drawing in the lines for the connect the dot system, which I am, by the way, this isn’t a theoretical question at all, would I be able to use a device like a tablet to help me out?

AG: Absolutely. We have a limited number of tablets for the game at the moment, but we are going to be adding more. Actually, we had a couple of guys come to the booth and say ‘you should put this on Switch.’

AH: Ah yes, that million dollar question.

AG: This isn’t me being the PR guy when I say this: at the moment we are not thinking about bringing this to Switch. We’re working so hard on the game we already have, adding another platform on top of that wouldn’t be good, and we really only want to think about that when we know that CardLife is super successful. Then we can go to the big three: Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo and show them and be like ‘so, this is super successful, do you want it or not?’

But yes, we are going to be adding more tablets. There is a list of tablets that work with CardLife already posted in our forums if anyone wants to check that out, but we’ll be updating that as soon as come out of launch. It’s just another thing on our list of 99 things to do [laughs].

AH: You’re a busy guy!

AG: Yeah, but it’s a great thing. When we released the game onto Early Alpha, it isn’t as though we were scared, but we knew we were onto a good thing. We were trying to go under the radar a little, but then the numbers for CardLife got really, really good and we felt that we needed to ‘get this game out there’ and make sure we are known for this [CardLife]. Because you know, you never know what Blizzard or Activision or anyone else is up to these days!

But really, we knew we were onto something good, but nervous too. We’re not sure how launch is going to go, but that makes us more excited too. At November we’ll know where we’re at, and then we can figure out what needs to be done.

AH: Well thank you so much for talking to me and VGR. We wish you the best of luck, and I for one, am looking forward to launch day for CardLife.

To find out more about CardLife and FreeJam, you can check out CardLife’s official website, its Steam page, and its Twitter account. Be sure to let the developers know what you think, and if you’re intrigued by what we’ve talked about then add it to your Wishlist on Steam.