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Mark Tucker: It’s similar to making a monster in some ways. We go through a concept phase where we send our ideas to our artist and he works up some quick sketches. There’s certainly a variety of weapons and armors that get tossed around when we’re coming up with ideas, and, believe it or not, we actually try to find a happy medium between the ludicrous and serious type ideas.

We want to have all the “normal” sort of weapons (axes, swords, bows, etc.), but we also want to include items like the “electric guitar” that acts as an axe. Then we have the sort of equipment seem like modified household items. For example, there’s the pizza slicer that’s been incorporated into the game as an axe.

Between the development team and the concept artist, we usually end up with pages and pages of thumbnail sketches of weapons. Eventually we start to hone in on those weapons that we believe will be the most successful for the game. Once we get those few selected, we’ll iterate on them, do some more defined sketches, then complete some renderings and throw them into the game.

Mark: Definitely. Although I’ve been “driving” this area of the game that certainly doesn’t mean that I come up with all the ideas. Our team is unique in the fact that we are very open and accepting of ideas from anyone on the team and even people outside of the team. We’ve gotten great concepts from the QA department, customer service, and others.

So if you have something that you think is a really good idea, it doesn’t matter who it comes from.

Mark: We typically put new items in every build of the game that we introduce. In our latest build that’s coming up we have two new Fighter-oriented armor sets going in and there are a bunch of new rifles – eight I believe – for the Ranger class.

It really varies from one build to the next, and it really depends on the areas of the game we’ve been focusing on. For example, Chunk #2 didn’t really have any new items to speak of, because we were really focused on major features. It’s really just a crap-shoot I guess. *laughs*

We used to have such a small design team, and now we’re finally getting big enough to include more items and content in every build we do from here on out.

Mark: We’re currently at thirteen, but a few more additions are on the way and we should be up to sixteen team members very shortly. Percentage wise, we’re doing some major growing. Originally we were only running with ten people.

With the growth, we’re hoping to bring some tighter focus to certain areas of the game, especially on the design side of things. We’re going to be able to crank out a lot more quests, have a larger focus on items, and throw some new monsters in there as well. Hopefully in a build or two it’ll be noticeable from the player’s standpoint.

Mark: I hope we wouldn’t lose that efficiency. That’s certainly a conversation that Steve Nichols (Producer) and I have quite a bit. He and I have been talking about that more lately, just because we’ve been growing the team and it’s definitely one of our goals to keep our development process the way it is, because we think it works and the people currently on the team like it.

That said, I think there’s a fine line between team size and productivity. I don’t know if we’ll ever need to grow the team to a huge size, so I think we can continue to stay lean and mean and keep or effectiveness.

Mark: I was wondering when this was going to come up! *laughs*

Mark: I’ll start off by saying this: It kicks ass. I’ve been running with it on my internal test server characters and going through all the new encounters with it. Honestly, I’ve been using it simply because it does kick ass.

It is the hardest hitting weapon in the game if you’re looking at damage-per-hit. It’s still balanced, but it just hits REALLY hard. That said, it is quite a bit slower than something like a katana, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that it lays down the law when it smacks you.

Along with the damage, it does some attribute increasing statistic on it along with an increased chance to stun your opponent. To top it off, the hammer also has a mana stealing component, so as a Fighter I found it to be quite useful because I didn’t have to think about managing my mana because it hit so hard and stole so much mana that I was always at full mana. It makes you really more concerned with cooldown issues rather than mana conservation.

Frankly, it looks cool too.