Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

With every tick of the clock, the team at NetDevil's Colorado-based studio draws closer to finishing their work on their upcoming space combat MMO, Jumpgate Evolution. As the Game Developer's Conference gets underway in San Francisco, the staff at Ten Ton Hammer took a moment to sit down with Hermann Peterscheck, the lead man for Jumpgate Evolution, to talk about the state of the game and what the team is curently working on. We also delve into some questions regarding PvP and PvP builds. As always, Hermann's answers are full of little tidbits of information, so make sure you read it all!

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Ten Ton Hammer: Can you give us a quick update on the status of JGE? What are you guys working on right now?

Hermann Peterscheck: There are a couple things that we've got going on. Obviously we've been making some strides in getting the Quantar race up and going. Since that's the area of the game that we've been working on most recently, that's also the coolest section of the game, in my opinion. But new stuff is always cooler than old stuff.

As we've grown, we've realized that what works well is when you put people into spaces that feel like interiors a bit more. That's one direction that we're going with some of the content in the game. Obviously we're always working on new ships and new enemies and moving capital ships.

Of course, when we create new situations or learn something new, we certainly go back and put that into the older content.

Ten Ton Hammer: Before you go on, how are you putting players into "interior" spaces in the middle of space? Are you just creating large opjects with holes and/or caves in the middle of them? Or something else?

Hermann: It's funny that you ask that question like that, because that's really the first thing we really thought about when we decided to put more of this type of content in the game. But what we realized is that in addition to caves and holes, you can create large land masses that take twenty to thirty seconds to fly over and you can put a bunch of those masses together and lay them out in such a way that you create the feeling of being "inside" something.

You're still in space and you can fly around in these masses, but there's still a sense of framing in your area. It's like your inside a compressed, small little cave or inside the husk of a planet, but you're actually surrounded by a bunch of very interesting looking objects that you're experiencing your gameplay around.

The interiors also give you a better sense of size, scale, speed and things like that. Just flying in open, empty space isn't all that interesting, so you need things around you to give you a sense of motion, depth, and interest.

So we're doing more, much more, of that now. It works out really, really well.