Damon Grow Talks About Making an MMO While Being Followed By Cameras

Mixing the development of a MMO with the rigors of making a reality TV show is sure to make for interesting times. Damon Grow and a team of volunteer developers are trying to do just that as they work to make Kaos War. The TV show is called...you guessed it...Creating Kaos. Recently he sat down to talk to the folks at Firing Squad.

FiringSquad: How hard is it to develop an MMOPG with an all volunteer development team?

Damon Grow: It is unbelievably hard. What made it extremely difficult from the beginning is that we are spread all over the world. We have to deal with time zone differences, the inability to work face-to-face, and many have daytime jobs to pay the bills while they work on the game. We lessen the hardships as a virtual company by using tools such as email, instant messenger, Voip programs like Teamspeak and Ventrilo, and passing data along by FTP and Sourcesafes such as Subversion. Many of our developers are currently on their way to our headquarters in San Francisco, which reduces the obstacles significantly.

On top of all that we are not just building a small game. Kaos War is an epic AAA MMO title and at this time an MMO game is simply the hardest and most time intensive game to develop. This means that without further funding, we’d need 100’s of industry quality volunteers to get enough work done to actualy finish the game. Getting financial backing is essential for a game like this.

Check out the rest of this intriguing interview and stay tuned for updates on Kaos War.