PALGN: Where did you get the name NetDevil?
Scott: We’re all Scuba divers, and we wanted some cool - something to do with scuba diving ‘cause we all loved it, but all the cool names like ‘shark’ and ‘stingray’ was long gone, even by ’97. And so we were searching, and we found Anglerfish and we thought, ‘wow, Anglerfish are so cool’, and we found a description that said fisherman would call them net devils when they’d catch them in their nets because they had no idea what these things were. And so we were like, ‘perfect!’
PALGN: The original Jumpgate was released back around 2001, and it was pretty advanced for the time - how does Jumpgate Evolution fit in with the original Jumpgate and where is it different?
Scott: It’s one of those things where at a high level it’s not very different at all, but at a detailed level it’s completely different. With Jumpgate, we were just learning how to make games - we’d never made a game before, we didn’t know what we wanted it to be, we didn’t know what made a good game – we were just software developers, right? And for us, Jumpgate was like, ‘I’ve always wanted to make a game and this is the game we’ve always wanted to make, so let’s try it.’ The thing that a lot of people do when they make their first game is they make it way too complex, because you’re like ‘wouldn’t it be cool if we did this extra one thing here and ...’
We were just talking about power this morning , and just understanding how power works in jumping is very, very complex. That’s the kind of focus we have in Jumpgate Evolution - we’re making it accessible from day one.
PALGN: And by power you mean like game-play power?
Scott:No, I mean the power in your ship, like how much power have you got left for your shields versus your radar, and how does that fit with when your shields take damage, and when you pull the trigger on your gun - it’s very complex. Very deep and very cool, but there’s a learning curve to understanding all the neat stuff. We don’t want to lose that, but what we want to do is reduce the learning curve. I think games like Lord of the Rings and World of Warcraft have proven that a more accessible game upfront can be just as rewarding, even to hard core players - accessible doesn’t just mean simpler, it just means easy to play.
PALGN: I was huge fan of Wing Commander back in the day, but I also played and enjoyed X2 and X3, so there’s a fair spectrum between stuff that’s easy to pick up and play and is very arcadeish through to the extreme polar examples, like Flight simulator - where does Jumpgate Evolution fit in, and how are you going to help players get over the learning curve?
Scott:Well, I think we came up with a pretty cool solution. Jumpgate’s flight engine was probably the most core of its features - it was this pseudo-Newtonian flight model where you still had drag and could turn around backwards and fire where you were while still flying. It’s what a lot of people loved, and it’s probably what we spent the most time on, really figuring out what’s the right balance between real and fun, you know? We made it, and it ended up being far too difficult for most people to fly, but once they mastered it, man they loved it. And so this time, what we did is come up with something similar to traction control for your car.
It’s similar to what a lot of space games do, in that it defaults to being on. What it basically does is try to assist you to make sure that your heading is what you expect it to be - if you’re flying and you turn sideways in the old game, you kind of continue in the same direction for a while before you correct. Now you can very quickly correct if it’s on, but you can turn it on and off. And there’s an advantage to turning it off - let’s say you were fighting against someone very large and you wanted to strafe along and fire. You can still turn it off and go back to the old flight model, so it’s still there and for people who are already experts at the old flight model. They can never use the new one if they don’t want to, but for new players it’s much simpler. You just kind of go where you expect to. We found a pretty cool way of blending the two models so that both are usable.
PALGN: So, you mentioned scale - what kind of scale battles are you thinking of, both in terms of ships flying around as well as the size of the ships that you’re going against? You mentioned strafing against something very large - is that part of the core game mechanic, the idea to have massive ships?
Herman:Yes - the other thing with space games in general is they tend to be dark and empty. So, we wanted a game that was bright and full because it’s more visually compelling to do so. One of the things we’re working on right now is battle station combat, so while it’s fun to talk about things, it’s also fun to take out really huge bases. Really, our approach is very simplistic - we kind of sit around and talk about stuff. We’re all space fans, so we think about what are the cool moments in space movies that we remember, and it’s always stuff like the Death Star being blown up and the fleet coming in at the end of ‘Return of the Jedi’. You remember those moments, and if you can capture those moments in a game, that’s what people really play for, right? If you have enough of them then people keep playing forever and ever and ever.
So really, the exercise of figuring out what to do with Jumpgate, in addition to the accessibility stuff that Scott talked about, is recreating almost cinema-like moments of emotion. For example, if you have this big battle station and it takes six people to take it down, you were like, ‘remember that time we got together to blow that thing up, that was really fun let’s go do it again!’ We want to create those moments, and scale is I think a big part of making games emotionally compelling, because even in the real world, when you see some really cool big awesome thing you remember it - you don’t remember all the just normal little buildings. And so I think games need to recreate that.
PALGN: You talk about player created situations, and those being the key thing that you’re looking for. If there’s a spectrum between, for instance, the Lord of the Rings / World of Warcraft, very quest driven, linear, repeated game play, and Eve Online on the other side when virtually everything is effectively player generated, are you looking to provide both experiences or are you leaning towards one more than the other?
Herman: Yeah, we want to do both, because the reality is most people tend to solo their way through MMOs, until later at least, or they start with their pre-existing friends and then they make more friends in the game. And so on one hand you want people to have the feeling that they have a say in what’s going on in the world, but then on the other hand you want to provide people with content that they can sort of, trip over. In some cases it’s very direct, like you need to have a sense that, ‘I’m logging into the game, tell me what to do.’
I don’t like games that don’t tell me what to do. Grand Theft Auto is an example - people say Grand Theft Auto is awesome, it has this huge open gameplay that lets you go wherever you want, do whatever you want, but at the same time Grand Theft Auto constantly tells you what to do all the time. ‘Go here’, ‘talk to this guy’, ‘go over there’...
Scott: But you don’t have to do that.
Herman: Yeah.
Scott: That’s the kicker, if you want to go do something else, you certainly can. We’re just going to provide you with lots of hints of like, ‘here’s some things you could do!’
Herman: Right. So we really want to make sure that you have a lot of different things to do at once. For example, in the context of Jumpgate Evolution, you can go do this mission and increase your faction rating so you can unlock this new ship that you can buy, or you can go mining, get better at mining so you can mine this other stuff ...
Scott: ... and then sell the ore to other players.
Herman: Yeah, or you can go explore this new area and see if you find something new in space. You need to have options so that when you’re sitting around not playing the game you are thinking about what you’re going to do when you go and play. And, I think that games that are successful in the MMO space have that. They have that thing of like, ‘oh, what am I going to do next? Oh yeah, I could do this, this, this and this.’ And that’s really about having things that are very simple to explain and having a lot of different options available. And then, also, things in the long term and in the short term.
PALGN: You mentioned Grand Theft Auto – one of the challenges of designing a space game is that from a Grand Theft Auto perspective, Liberty City is reasonably small and compact with a lot of things going on. On the other hand, space is absolutely massive and largely empty - how are you balancing that?
Scott: One of the very big things we did is acknowledge that space is empty, and it was a problem. So one what we did was develop an AI server to basically help fill space. The AI can play a number of roles that players also play. So if goods need to be moved from this station to this station because it needs goods to start building something else, it will put out a request to other stations which listen for that and launch transports actually carrying the stuff that needs to go there. There’s also ships that are patrolling that are defenders, there’s aliens, there’s pirates and they’re all doing the kinds of things that we always want players to do. If you want to be a pirate you need cargo ships to rob, but if you want to be a cargo ship, you need threats to keep it interesting. And so we basically made all these AI to fill all these different roles and keep the game full, so as a player you’ve always got something out there that you can go deal with, regardless of whether there are other players to do it or not.
PALGN: You’ve grown quite significantly over time - one of the projects which you recently announced was the Lego game, which is still pretty undefined. Is there anything you could say about that at this point?
Scott: Well, the answer is ‘no’, just because, it’s not ready to talk about. When we started this project it was, ‘awesome, we get to make the Lego universe game!’ And then, the next question was, ‘what is the Lego universe?’ You know, it’s not an obvious thing. There’s a lot of things that Lego wants to accomplish. So basically, where we are right now is we’ve got a game up and functioning, we’re doing a lot of focus testing, we bring a lot of kids and parents into our offices and do testing, and then we do focus testing Lego’s professional global studios. Stuff like, ‘hey what do think about this and this game mechanic’, and, ‘do you think it’s fun?’, and, ‘what do you think as a parent about these options for your kids?’
We’re still kind of in that phase where we’re just testing and testing and testing and trying stuff. Once we get through that and have a really solid vision that both parents and kids have bought into, that’s when I think we’ll be ready to talk about this.
PALGN: Picking up the Lego project must have been very interesting from an organisational perspective - you guys went from 3 people up to around 60 ...
Scott: We’re over 80 now ... we were around 45 or so when we first met with Lego and we’ve almost doubled since then. The majority of the team is on that project - it’s a very complex project, but at the same time, it’s a dream project. I think everybody liked to play Lego, I don’t know anybody who says, ‘oh, I hate Lego’.
PALGN: Organisationally, how have you managed that growth, and have you found it changed the culture?
Scott: I don’t know if it’s changed the culture so much. It probably has had some impact - there’s a lot of things we’ve had to do that we haven’t needed to do before, and put processes in place that never had to be there. It’s not what we imagined when we were writing Jumpgate in the basement and talking about stuff like, ‘oh, how much damage should missiles do.’ I deal with very different problems now, which is interesting. It’s been an interesting evolution for the company, but probably the most difficult part has just been growing this much.
PALGN: Where are you keen to take NetDevil? Are you happy with the level of development that you’re doing? Do you want to stay focused on developing a handful of high quality games, do you want to take over the world?
Scott: Before we were very focused on one thing at a time. I think it would be better to have multiple projects at the same time, but we don’t want to be EA and doing 40 at a time. We would like to be doing different games with different scopes. And so, one of the other things that you’re going to start seeing more of from us too is even more casual games - we’re going to start doing some web-based, very MMO-lite types of games, leveraging on this technology base that we have to make a full spectrum of games. What I’d like to do is games that are different to what everyone else is doing. With Jumpgate, there was nothing like it at the time. Auto Assault was very different, and Lego, there’s nothing like what we’re trying to do with that. I still don’t feel like there’s a strong competitor to Jumpgate because we’re going after the action/space market that no-one’s really gone after, and so that’s what we’re going to continue to focus on - markets that we feel are sort of under-attacked. What we’re not necessarily going after is the fantasy / MMO market because there are plenty of people doing a great job there. That’s our vision for the future, and depending on the market, maybe the right way to attack it is a very small web-game or maybe it’s a full featured, huge MMO - we kind of want to be able to do whatever makes sense.
PALGN: Where, if anywhere, do consoles fit into your strategic roadmap? You mentioned online-lite ...
Scott: I would imagine that you’ll see console games from us probably in the next few years. Certainly, we’re platform agnostic - we don’t really care, it’s not like we love the PC and despise consoles. It’s more just that that’s where the MMO market is right now, and I think that’s what our specialty is and we’ll probably just move however the market moves.
PALGN: Nintendo’s pushing out WiiWare, Xbox Live Aracade has been out for quite a while - if you’re looking at those more ‘lite-type’ games, are you considering more retail releases, or are you looking at potentially using these new delivery mechanisms?
Scott: I love online delivery, and we’re absolutely evaluating it. I think Xbox Live Arcade is a great system, I think what they’ve done with Live is excellent, so yes, we’re looking at a number of ways of how we can begin to merge what we’re doing.
PALGN: With everything that you’ve been through, would you do it again?
Scott: Oh yeah, this is a dream job! All I ever wanted to do is make games. In fourth grade, our school got some Apple IIs and I was in a program where we got to check them out. I played a game called Lemonade Stand, they taught us BASIC, and that was it – I knew right then this is all I ever wanted to do and so, yeah, I’d do this over and over a million times, it’s a blast.
PALGN: You’ve opened applications for an online Beta – any indications when that’s going to go live?
Scott: As soon as it’s fun. I’m not trying to be elusive; it’s just that we don’t know if it’s three features or twenty features away, but the answer is as soon as it’s ready. We want to go as soon as we can - we have a really great, though small, community that we want to get back in the fold on this, get their opinions, and begin to really craft it, because I’m sure a lot of things we’re trying are going to be wrong. We might think it’s cool, but they won’t, and since we won’t ship until it’s great, that’s kind of where are - it’s close, it’s just it’s not the greatest space game you’ve ever played yet and that’s really what our goal is. So we’re going to iterate on that until we feel like it is, and that’s when we’ll start Beta.
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