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

Ten Ton Hammer: What else are you excited about?

Hermann: It's nice to have all three nations in the game now. We're in the mode of filling out all the content now rather than dealing with weird bugs, database issues and that sort of thing.

It takes so long to get a game to a state where it's actually fun to play then working on completing it. At the beginning, you have all the nice ideas, and in the middle it's all the brutal grunt work. That's pretty much all we've been doing the last year, so it's nice to finally be coming out of the tunnel a little bit.

Ten Ton Hammer: How are things progressing in PvP?

Hermann: That's the other thing we've been working a lot on. We've got this battle scenario with flying capital ships and you have to destroy the capital ships.  We've had internal battles, and they get pretty heated.

That's good, because people care. They're staged battles, so we're taking out random components to see how it affects the outcome of the matches. Now we're working on this torpedo scenario where players can shoot a giant missile that does huge amounts of damage to an opponent or opponents objectives.

We're tuning the gameplay around specific types of scenarios, so that one player is going to come in with a heavier fighter with one of these torpedoes attached and that player needs to launch the missile in order to take out the enemy capital ship. You can whittle it down with little lasers if you want to, but it would just take a long, long time.

It's fun to create these little strategic moments in the game. So the capital ship fight is really the first epic "battle space" area in the game, and we've been taking a lot of time doing little tests and more little tests and tuning things to see how they work. And we've been doing that for quite some time.

I'm really eager to see what the response is going to be when we actually start testing it with the public.

That said, we ARE doing friends and family testing now. So we have a limited insight into how players are going to perceive those things. Luckily with such a small test group, we can quickly adjust and retest things to make sure it's all working properly.