It’s a Big World After All:

Closing

We watched a brief demo of the Big World Suite at work. Terrain building looked deceptively simple. The technician demoing the game literally moved mountains, though not by faith…by maneuvering a large round red target over an area and clicking the mouse to raise the terrain as he saw fit. (I compared the technology to terrain building in The Sims, because it looks quite similar, and I was treated to raised eyebrows and polite nods that implied, “Poor, simple girl.” But I digress.) Up in the newly-constructed mountains, it began to snow. Spencer explained the system could build weather. “You can have rain, snow…a storm front rolling in,” he said.

Big World’s Technology Suite began development in 1999, and Big World itself was formed in 2001. They began licensing in 2003, in pursuit of providing and solving real world MMO development problems. Spencer explained, “At one point, we wanted to put our system to the test, so we tried developing our own MMO to run on it. But we scrapped it—we decided to stay focused on what we do best.”

“What does Big World do best?” queried my other partner for the interview, Michael Sun.

“Look at it this way,” said Spencer, “this may be a tired analogy, but every time the movie industry creates a new movie, they don’t go out and reinvent the camera. What we do is provide the solution that lets game developers do what they do best—focus on content, not tech.”

All in all, our visit to big world was more enlightening than I think any of us Hammers thought it would be. As we left the booth, we commented to one another about how interesting the presentation had been. Apparently we can look for more games—big games—developed with Big World Technology Suite some time in the future. In my way of thinking, anything that makes the MMO development process flow more smoothly, and take less time, is a good thing.