Bitmob posted up a fresh interview the end of last week with Mike Legg, President of Petroglyph, about our upcoming MMORTS, End of Nations. Check it out!:
Bitmob: So you Petroglyph guys have a lot of history with real-time strategy games, and End of Nations seems like it could be a pretty ambitious evolutionary step for the genre. Can you outline the genesis of the project?
ML: Back in our Westwood days, we worked on a lot of RTS games, all the way back to Dune 2 and all the way forward with our seven years at Petroglyph. So when we started Petroglyph, MMOs were taking over the RPG market. Actually, even before then. RTS used to be a lot bigger than RPG. The pie chart got bigger and bigger for RPG and then they became MMOs, and RTS started to shrink.
When we started Petroglyph, Joe Bostic -- who's co-founder of Petroglyph with myself and Steve Tall, and he's also our director of game design -- Joe, he had a lot of creative influence and put a lot of work into Dune 2 and the Command & Conquer series. It was his vision when we started the company to make [an] MMORTS.
And at that time, it wasn't really possible. We ran the numbers and we thought about how would we do this kind of thing, because you know, traditionally, it's about peer-to-peer networking. We knew if we did an MMORTS, we'd have to go with a client-server model. Over the years we had these great breakthroughs in technology, you know, with multi-core processors, all the multi-threading of the operating systems, people getting faster and faster Internet connections and bigger pipes. We were finally realizing [that] it was going to become technically feasible to do this.
When we started doing this, Trion [the publisher/developer], those guys were just starting up. We know a lot of the guys from their past lives, from working together in the past...we shared the vision with them, and they completely got it. They totally understood it, and they wanted to break into new genres.
That, for us, was a great validation, because they technically scrutinized the feasibility of it as well, and when they said, yeah, this looks cool, and this is now possible, we were like, all right, cool! We got sanity checked and it sounds like it's doable.
The next question was, OK, just because we can do it, is it going to be fun? So what we did with Trion was, we kind of took a two-pronged approach. They were working on the Trion platform, doing the backend and all the persistence, the billing, the infrastructure, and all this great stuff. We decided that we're going to do a playable prototype that kind of simulates cooperative PVE in an RTS, you know, a team, using our current technology. We knew this was going to be a dead-end road, but that we'd learn a lot from it.
Part of our team, the designers, and the artists, and the audio team, they started running down a road where they took the last state of our engine and then pushed it forward and just tried out to see if that style of gameplay was going to be fun. A lot of it was faked, a lot of it was smoke and mirrors, and we knew that -- we just wanted to try and see if it would be fun.
At the [same] time, our technical team started converting our peer-to-peer multiplayer technology into client-server technology. And that took quite a while -- it was a ton of work to get to that point. So they ran down another path while we were developing the playable prototype. We got to the end of the playable prototype, checked it out, and it actually looked really fun.
As soon as we saw that the play was fun, we then cut that thing -- we said, OK, it's done, this is dead, we're ending this path, but we're going to take a lot of the assets; the sound, the music, and the art, UI elements, things that we've learned, and now we're going to flip a lot of that over to where the programmers were working on their track. That allowed us to continue up through pre-production, where we finally got to what we call a vertical slice, which is kind of a playable prove-out of everything. What was really cool about that was, the technologists at Trion on the platform side really, really scrutinized, stress-tested, and put it through the ringer to make sure it was actually a sustainable game.
Now the fact is, OK, it's fun, can we make this, it's technologically possible -- can we actually afford to do it? We've got X number of players playing on these servers...we don't just want to go out of business. Running some tests and looking at things, we were like, hey, this looks like a pretty cool venture. That kind of carried us up through pre-production and the vertical slice, then we went into production and now we're on our way.
Read the rest of the interview at Bitmob!
