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The Evolution of Jumpgate

An Inside Look at the Revitalization of NetDevil’s First MMOG

By Cody “Micajah” Bye

When people think of NetDevil, the games that pop readily to mind are LEGO Universe, Auto Assault, and Warmonger. They consider NetDevil to be the development team that “blows $#!@ up”, as the studio that just opened up brand new offices in Louisville, Colo., and as a fairly successful group that has shown a fulfilled product each time they (publicly) go to work.

However, not many people know the background of NetDevil, with their basement beginnings (Scott Brown’s basement, actually) and humble origins. Although NetDevil has existed for ten years, most folks are incredibly unfamiliar with the company before Auto Assault. Stranger still, most individuals are not familiar with NetDevil’s first game, an MMOG by the name of Jumpgate.

Hermann Petersheck, Producer of NetDevil's Jumpgate Evolution

Originally, Jumpgate was – and still is – a space combat simulator. Unlike many of the sci-fi / space games that are prowling the MMOG marketplace, Jumpgate allows for direct flight control of your spaceship, more akin to games like Privateer, Wing Commander, and X-wing vs. Tie Fighter than EVE Online or Earth and Beyond. You control your ship with a movement of the mouse or a direction on the joystick, and you fire with your mouse buttons, joystick triggers, or wherever you map that function to. But as NetDevil’s first game, many of the core elements developed in the system were quite dated, everything from the gameplay features to the graphics foundation.

To many gamers, it’s a mark of pride to “Know Your Roots”; it’s a term used to describe the fundamental aspects you learned on your first video game. For many of us, that was the original Nintendo Entertainment System or an old Atari, Odyssey, or Intellivision. For NetDevil, Jumpgate is the epitome of their “roots” and instead of tossing the game aside like so many development companies tend to do, NetDevil put together a small team to expand and fully realize the true potential of their first MMOG.

Over the course of the last ten months, NetDevil has been overhauling, remarketing, and generally rediscovering the essence of Jumpgate. Rumors of a Jumpgate redesign have been flying around the Internet since the early part of this year, with more “concrete” explanations of a revitalization project becoming frequent as the team approached the summer convention season. As an added exclamation point to their open house / 10th anniversary party, NetDevil went live with the Jumpgate Evolution website and has already started the beta sign-up process.

Jumpgates are extremely impressive, especially when viewed up close.

As a title that was released in 2001 after a fairly lengthy development cycle, Jumpgate has always been criticized for having graphics that were too dark, too open for many users. Ultimately, space can be a very uninviting place, and that doesn’t bode well for people used to the bright colors and flashy animations of land-based games. But space is also “fantastic” in its own right and can (and should) be filled with stars, nebulas, planets, and asteroids. “We tried to make very saturated-looking space,” said Hermann Petersheck, Jumpgate’s producer. “The original Jumpgate was very dark, and that wasn’t very accessible to most people. We wanted to make it easier for gamers to get into our world”

And they’ve certainly succeeded. The screenshots that are provided in this article, along with the gallery we’ve posted for everyone to view, give examples of the amount of detail and color present in Jumpgate’s space, but when you fly around there’s even more to see. In the gameplay example we saw, you could look at a planet’s dark side and see thousands of tiny lights, representing the civilization located on the planet. The space stations and jumpgates are also immense, with an individual ship barely measuring up to one of the huge “petals” on the jumpgate.

“The original game was big, but empty,” Petersheck confided. “We wanted to fill Jumpgate Evolution up with these monolithic structures to fill the empty space for the players.” The press was even lucky enough to view a prototype of the “player run” stations that gamers will eventually buy in Jumpgate Evolution. “Players can set their own price on these stations. They can also insert ‘modules’ on them that have refineries, refueling stations, and other elements that they can allow other players to access.”