This marks the third and final part of our A Kingdom for Keflings interviews.  Today, Steve Taylor is back on the hot seat to answer some more questions about how the decision to include Avatars affected Keflings and also what might be next for NinjaBee.  And I even snagged a shot of NinjaBee's Valerie Cope standing alongside her Avatar in a world of Keflings and also a shot of the premium theme for A Kingdom for Keflings.  Good stuff.

Hit the jump for the full interview and when you're done make sure you go get the AKFK demo (if you haven't already) and see what all the fuss is about.

LunarDuality: It seems as if NinjaBee has conspired with Microsoft to always have a game concept to push some new innovative technological idea on the Xbox platform. Of course, Outpost Kaloki X was a launch title, Band of Bugs brought user generated content to XBLA, and now A Kingdom for Keflings shows up with a surprise of its own: playable Avatars. Is this emphasis on new features a NinjaBee technology-fetish, a push from Microsoft, some combination of the two, or something else entirely?

Steve Taylor: I suppose it's a combination of those things and luck. It was partly luck that put us in the right place at the right time for a launch title, and partly luck that the same thing happened for Avatars. But of course it still wouldn't happen if both NinjaBee and Microsoft weren't pushing for it. We like to play with new technology and try out new game ideas, and Microsoft likes to let us. :) I have to give a lot of credit to our programming team, in particular Kevin Heap, for being happy to take on new challenges and being capable of making it all happen.

LD: How development-friendly was the choice to include Avatars? Did it add significant cost and time to the project or was it more plug-and-play?

ST: There are some plug-and-play ways that games can include Avatars, and I'm personally quite impressed with how easy they've made it to pop basic Avatar support into a game. But A Kingdom for Keflings supports Avatars in a deep way, with fully playable Avatars in the game world, interacting with objects, reacting to player control, playing custom animations, etc. That wasn't easy, especially when we were working with pre-release technology. But the team is awesome and worked very hard to pull it off. We also got a lot of support from various groups at Microsoft who wanted to see this happen as much as we did, and who were as excited as we were to see how well it fit! We had great opportunities to talk to some technical and artistic people who were part of the initial creation of the Avatar system, and Avatar support in A Kingdom for Keflings is a lot better as a result.

LD: Did NinjaBee have any impact on or dialog with the people responsible for the platform-wide development of Avatars? Were there lessons learned during your project that will likely affect every Avatar game in the future, or was the Avatar technology totally buttoned up before you even saw it?

ST: Definitely not buttoned up, but close. We’ve got an opportunity to give feedback on how the implementation process went, and improve the technical experience for future developers, but I don't think we've had any huge impact over the policies and high-level design of Avatars at this point. On the other hand, a lot of people were looking at the game as it progressed, since we were one of the earliest and farthest-along teams working on Avatar integration, so maybe we helped as a final test case in some ways.

LD: Now for some more general NinjaBee questions.  How do you guys keep it up day after day and year after year amidst the increasingly large and conglomerated gaming corporations? What's the fire that burns inside the mystical NinjaBee?

ST: This question scares me. Thanks a lot. I need to go take a nap now.

I'm not sure if I can point at any thing in particular. We're having fun and doing what we want to do. We try to hire smart people who care about what they're making. One thing I can tell you for sure, we are definitely not dependent on experimental drugs and brain implants from fringe science research labs in Kuala Lumpur. Really. I swear.

LD: What lessons have been learned during previous product launches and applied to AKFK regarding the certification process (and the test cycle in general) that will (fingers crossed) help you avoid a launch marred by technical difficulties?

ST: Well, I think we've learned a few things. For example, we ran into problems with previous titles because we were too dependent on testing with cheats. For this game, we were a lot more careful about testing from scratch all the way through with no cheats. We did a lot more internal testing during development this time, starting earlier and involving more people. And our technology has gotten more solid with each game release. Let's hope these things help... :) At the same time, the system and service are growing and improving - they get a little more complicated every month. Each project we've done has run into new problems that didn't even exist in our previous games. This time, obviously, Avatars are a big example of that. I hope it turns out as smooth in the real world as it has in our tests.

LD: I think I always ask you guys this but why are you all attracted to the process of "reinventing the wheel", as it were, for each new project? Why no sequels?

ST: I think my answer in the past has been that the new stuff simply appeals to us more. Exploring, inventing, making new stuff - that's what we got into game development for. I still feel that way, but we're absolutely open to doing sequels, and we're exploring more in that direction now than we have in the past. Nothing to announce, yet.

A tease answer for my final question, how appropriate.  Well, that wraps up the interviews but I just want to extend a huge thank you to Steve Taylor, Brent Fox, Valerie Cope (for setting all this up), and of course the team at NinjaBee for giving me something fun to talk about.