Warren Schultz, writing for Game Industry at About.com, has published a three-part interview with Richard Garriott — from the Unite 2013 conference — that examines Shroud of the Avatar’s development process and community engagement.

Here are the links: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

The first part of the interview looks at the current development progress of Shroud of the Avatar, which Garriott seems satisfied with:

So, big picture, how is development on Shroud of the Avatar going?

Very well. Almost every day I see the output of our team, and am constantly reminded about how much faster this development process going in any other game I’ve been involved with in decades, and largely thanks to Unity. We’re just now about a hundred and twenty days in, and it would be hard to find something to complain about.

We do have a lot to accomplish within eighteen months or so, so we definitely feel the burn of the urgency of getting things done, but it’s so far so good.

We’re hoping that even by this Christmas, Decemberish or whenever we can, we’re hoping to put a version into players’ hands.

And lo! It would seem that goal will be met.

The second part of the interview delves into the game’s crafting system and economy:

So would you say that you are trying to create a top-to-bottom economy, where even the most mundane things in the world are crafted? How comprehensive are you planning to be?

Pretty comprehensive. I mean there are some places where we’re not being comprehensive, like you can’t go build a house from timbers, at least, currently. But yes, we are trying to make sure the economy is self-sufficient.

And we’re trying to get away from like a lot of MMOs, where if you want to go up in blacksmithing skill in swords, you make a bunch of useless swords. And you make much more useless swords and much more useless swords. And so we’re trying to get out of that loop, and instead get you working on things which are actually useful to the playerbase. And of course, repairing things that are wearing out is something that is useful to the playerbase, and if you’re making all the other kinds of tools and things that are used throughout the game, that is also useful things for you to make instead of repetitiously building less-useful parts.

And we’re even going to say that to the degree that people do need to make a hundred basic swords, that those can be used as raw material in something else, so that there’s a reason to have these things.

Finally, the third part of the interview looks at crowdfunding and community:

How has that been working, using the contests to source game assets from the community?

It’s working out great. We’re not only doing asset contests… So our process works like this: the very base assets, the common world reality assets, we’re just finding those on the Unity Asset Store. They’re phenomenally good. Whether that’s terrain, trees, you know, 80 percent of that, we’re doing on the Asset Store.

But, you’ll find that almost every tree on the Asset Store is a pine tree variation. Straight up and down trunk with some branches. No oak trees. It’s weird. So, we’re having to go back and make more interesting trees, which is unfortunate for us, because I’d rather buy a generic piece. So, as much as possible, we’re getting our generic stuff off the Asset Store.

Then, there’s sort of second class, which is medieval fantasy generic, but not quite reality generic. But these won’t generally exist in the Asset Store, so these we give out to the community. And so we need barrels and chairs, and other things, which a lot of it exists on the asset store, but not in the right resolution, or the right reality-looking versus cartoony-looking, so we try to give some specifications of what we’re looking for, and the community has phenomenally, and very quickly produced all that we need.

There’s much, much more contained in all three parts of the interview; click on through the links above to read the whole thing!