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

Ten Ton Hammer: So what were your greatest challenges developing the game?

Jake Rodgers:  For me, that’s easy. It was the user interface. Having an MMOG on an iPhone, we’ve done some things that definitely simplify things quite a bit, but that was kind of hard. Our visual challenges too; to make that happen and not have buttons everywhere on the HUD when you’re trying to play. I think that we addressed that pretty well. It was a constant ’where are we going to put this button?'

Spacetime Studios: Yeah, where’s this going to go when you’re managing inventory, there’s hills, and spells….

Jake Rodgers: So once we did that, we got that to a place where we were pretty happy about it, getting it over to the iPad, there’s so much space that we ran into the opposite problem. Now there are all these gaps everywhere.

Jason Decker: The most difficult thing was getting our heads around the fact that we were going to make iPhone games a while ago, and after that when we decided to make the MMOG, you have to shift to thinking about the sessions. I was on the receiving end of a critique from everybody about how long it’s going to take, about grinding against the mobs and all that stuff. For me, the thing to get right away was making the experience feel like it belonged on the device. I knew the UI was in good hands, I knew the technology would be there, but for my part of it, making it fun to fight a mob and still be meaningful, making travel somewhat meaningful but then accessibility…but all of that stuff seems like a bucket of contradictions. So, fundamentally, being a designer on the project was my challenge.

Jake Rodgers: There are so many things, when we started out, that we had the assumption, even though they weren’t fun, that they had to be in the game because it was an MMOG, but we got rid of a lot of that stuff. To me, this is the Peggle of MMOGs. I like it; I don’t even have to think about it. It’s not a grind ever.

Gary Gattis: For me, the biggest challenge was working with my partners again in such close quarters. That’s not true!

Jake Rodgers: Gary has a lot of questions about things that we have to answer all the time.

Gary Gattis: Man, we’ve been together for…this is our fifth year. At this kind of company, most people have worked together ten years prior to this. It’s not easy running a small, sometimes big company. I love these guys more than I ever have.

Jason Decker: I’m thrilled to be working on a project that is so relevant and revolutionary. I do believe, in my heart of hearts, that all successful MMOGs will be put on mobile devices at some point in time in the future. Not only on mobile devices, but ported to the mobile device because it lends itself to it. To be on the forefront of that, for me, is one of the most exciting times in my career.



Ten Ton Hammer: So you have quite a bit of experience behind you, too. What stuff have you worked on in the past?

Cinco Barnes: Well, Rick Delashmit comes to us by way of some Ultima experience long ago. He did a bunch of that stuff.

Jake Rodgers: I worked on a few Ultimas, but not Ultima Online. My first game was Wing Commander 2, then Privateer.

Jason Decker: Actually, we worked together at SOE on Star Wars Galaxies. That was the first MMOG for me, and for you, too.

Jake Rodgers: Yeah. That was a big learning experience. We had 5 ½ years of that, going through all that and starting the DC project right before we left.

Jason Decker: Actually, we did a couple of expansions for Galaxies. We did the space flight expansion, which for me, was the reason I was there. I really love space games so much. We did the Jump to Light Speed expansion, and Jake and I did the Rage of the Wookies, the episode III expansion, and that was cool.

We formed this studio around 2005 and started on a big MMOG project for NC Soft. That went really well for a while and we had a lot of neat stuff to show for it, technology and IP, but it wasn’t meant to be. I think that’s when we started turning our attention to making things a little bit smaller. We definitely have some experience in the MMOG industry. We’ve run around that block once or twice.

Ten Ton Hammer: Was there anything else you guys wanted to share about the game?

Spacetime Studios: We would like to mention our technology partner, Andy Sommers, and he’s absolutely brilliant. And there’s another guy called RickDelashmit who is kind of a right hand man too, so I want to make sure that if you’re naming names that those guys get their props. We’re small; we’re six guys right now. We were 50 at one point in time, so just as we’ve distilled the MMOG experience down to the iPhone, we’ve distilled the company right down to the core as well.