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

MMMOGs (Mobile Massively Multiplayer Online Games) are coming to the iPhone and iPad in the form of Pocket Legends, developed by Spacetime Studios. Ten Ton Hammer sat down with some members of the development team at Spacetime Studios-- Jason Decker (Assistant Art Director), Cinco Barnes (Vice President and Creative Director), Gary Gattis (Co-Founder), and Jake Rodgers (Art Director and Co-Founder)--to discuss this revolutionary game that blazes a new trail in the gaming frontier.

Ten Ton Hammer: Tell us a little bit about Pocket Legends.

Cinco Barnes: The game is an action RPG that really focuses on cooperative play and has a lot of depth of character. The team really started off with simple core concepts. A lot of us are old MMOG burnouts from big projects, so we wanted to cut loose on a platform that we’ve grown to love. We’ve done research and development and released several titles on the phone. So when it came time to do something that was really close to our heart it made sense, with our core skill sets, that it’d be really fun to make a simple MMORPG. But with that simple core, we started a whole lot of stuff.

There’s a lot to this that you don’t see in other MMOGs. There are some things in this that we’ve wanted to do for awhile, and it’s strange that it comes out on such a petite device. There’s some really good game play in this, especially between groups in the way that you can multiply powers by working together in a coordinated fashion. We also wanted to do a cute game; do something with animals in it that didn’t take itself too seriously and had a lot of room for humor; something that would give us, as developers, a chance to really have some fun together, build something that made us laugh and made us want to play together online.



Ten Ton Hammer: Can you tell us a little bit about the classes? Is everything split up into the standard roles of tank, healer, and DPS?

Cinco Barnes: Yes, we do have that holy trinity. The fundamental classes include an archer class, which is our avian species. He’s a bird and he’s great with the bow and dagger and he’s really strong in dex when he starts. The stat system is fully configurable so he can get a lot more powerful and he can get more intelligence to improve his mana and stuff like that. Basically, he’s the DPS class and he’s going to have the advantage, statistics wise, of being able to handle all the bad-ass machinery all the way from an automatic flaming crossbow to the longbows of frost and fire.

There’s also an enchantress class and she is the elf. This is one of the most important species in the storyline, and this character is a healer, and handles that role for the most part, but has a tremendous amount of spell DPS. We really wanted to have our support class able to devastate and make that something that isn’t a painful choice for characters, but instead have the sheer reality of being able to handle all this magic power. One of the big concerns for the designers for stuff like this is thinking about the future, and we’ve got some good ideas for classes that are going to come out later on that will help these core classes retain their main roles.

The final class is the warrior and this is a straightforward tanking class, but secondarily does DPS like you’d expect. He’s also this bear, the Ursen. This bear character has some neat species abilities such as being able to roar and scare folks. He has several really unique crowd control abilities that bounce the guys around when he stomps on the ground and pulls aggro away from the group.

So, the game includes the main classes you would expect, but our take on them is pretty fun. It’s streamlined and it’s got a lot of rock-and-roll to it. That’s what we’re starting with now, with plans to expand in a couple of logical areas.

Jake Rodgers: It’s fast and it’s funny, basically, and it is the traditional roles.