TE: I spoke once with Scott Brown, and he talked about making sure a game at its most basic is fun early in the process before you start adding a lot of content. Was that a focus?
HP: It’s an interesting thing. Obviously we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that issue. You get between 30 seconds and five minutes to make an impression when someone starts playing your game. And within that time they decide definitively if that game is worth playing or not, and if you don’t nail that time, you’re going to lose the majority of the people right there.
So, we spent an enormous amount of time on that initial amount of time and still are. Things like, how easy is it to log in and create a new character? How well does that system work? When you first enter the game, what are you seeing? What are you experiencing? What is hooking you into the game to make you care at all about it?
So it’s things like having the intro tell you a story that you care about. It’s seeing things that are visually compelling. It’s not having the ship controls get you frustrated. It’s being able to defeat the first enemies without too much trouble and get a good reward. And through this iterative testing process a lot of that stuff comes out. We make a flight engine we think is good, but if eight people come in and can’t fly the ship, we obviously need to make that engine work. It’s all these basic things that prevent a person from being engaged.
I think when people get a game and start playing it they want to enjoy it, to be engaged, and I’m amazed at how many games kick you in the teeth and say, “Whatever you do, don’t have fun.” If you talk people into that, eventually they go away. So we’re really focused on bringing down those barriers, and the temptation is, as a developer, to constantly worry about features and content. But, I’m also amazed that the games that end up doing well inevitably have the comment "I wish there was more." Like, you finish God of War 2, and you think that. That’s what you want from a game.
So these games that have thousands of hours of content but are mediocre actually have no content. After 30 seconds you put it away and you don’t care that there are 5,000, 500 or five missions, because you didn’t do one. So we want to make sure we have that positive first experience.
TE: You guys are self-publishing Jumpgate: Evolution. Is that still correct?
HP: As of right now, yes.
TE: Do you think we’ll see Jumpgate: Evolution on store shelves at some point, or will it be online only? Are you still working on that?
HP: I can’t comment on that right now.
TE: OK, do you have any plans for when beta might start?
HP: I don’t have any information on that right now. That’s one of the things that goes into it, right? I’ve seen a lot of MMOs beta too early and suffer the consequences. We are conscious of that, so we’ll go into beta when it’s ready.
Sean Sands is a freelance writer, one of the co-founder of Gamerswithjobs.com and runs a small graphic design business with his wife near Minneapolis. When not writing about gaming, he can often be found playing video games and pretending to call it work.
