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Interview Perpetuum par MP
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Interview of Dev BoyC by V0rador
V0rador: First of all, we would like to know more about the decision to create Perpetuum. Did you guys knew each others for a long time, were you all friends? One of you woke up few years ago and all of a sudden decided to dedicate his time and money to create the game? Tell us more about the story behind the creation of your company Avatar Creations.
Dev BoyC: Most of us had the dream of getting into the game development business long before we started working on the game. Some of us (Gargaj, Zoom and BoyC) worked together on demoscene projects before which caught the eye of Crm (Andras Liptak, the lead developer of Perpetuum), so he contacted BoyC about creating a game. They started off together, and several friends and acquaintances joined the team over the months/years. The idea always was to create something that is our own, and isn't owned by some company where we're only employees. We wanted to be able to make a living of our passion.
V0rador: What are the inspirations of the developers when it comes to game mechanics, design soundtrack? Do you have particular movies, games, books you love and got your inspiration from?
Dev BoyC: Turns out the team is really like-minded, we're all sci-fi geeks in some form or another (nothing illustrates this better than the fact that Jr, one of the server coders has an alien facehugger tattoo grabbing his arm ;)), so the lore and the overall feel and ideas of the game come from this amalgam of combined sci-fi stuff that each of us brought to the table. We really liked the idea of building a game around futuristic and alien technology, and we depended on these ideas when designing a lot of the core game mechanics. Research, prototyping and manufacture are good examples of this.
V0rador: I would like you to tell us more about the game release. Shortly after the release you took the decision to "rollback" the game, could you explain how / why you came to this?
Dev BoyC: The switch to live mode brought with us a complex change that we couldn't test during the beta. We had a small glitch in the system which resulted in a few accounts with incorrect extension point values. Due to a number of factors coming together the problem escalated to a level where we decided that in order not to compromise the level playingfield on day 1, we'd do a rollback. It was a hard decision, and we extended the validity of each account in the system by 2 days as reimbursement. The system has been working flawlessly since, as all the other systems of the game have been rigorously tested during the 18 months of beta.
V0rador: It appears the situation is much better these days but recently from time to time in the safe areas, people are still having big "hicups" in the game due to lag and sudden increase of the ping. Are you making any progress on this? Could you explain to us what is the problem?
Dev BoyC: We had a system wide problem causing 10-15 second lag spikes on certain zones. The problem has been found and fixed, the disconnects some people encounter now originate outside our system, mostly due to network hiccups somewhere between our hosting and the client computer.
V0rador: On the official website, in the category media / concept art it appears everybody is dribbling on the mecha looking like a tank and the one looking like a panther. Can we expect to see these cool looking robots in the game in a close future? What can you tell us regarding this topic?
Dev BoyC: Those robots will definitely come someday, but we still need to make some gameplay and system changes happen before they do. For now the next new robot planned to be introduced will be a higher class hauler bot. The concept arts you referred to are from two complete tiers of machines that aren't in the game yet.
V0rador: First of all, we would like to know more about the decision to create Perpetuum. Did you guys knew each others for a long time, were you all friends? One of you woke up few years ago and all of a sudden decided to dedicate his time and money to create the game? Tell us more about the story behind the creation of your company Avatar Creations.
Dev BoyC: Most of us had the dream of getting into the game development business long before we started working on the game. Some of us (Gargaj, Zoom and BoyC) worked together on demoscene projects before which caught the eye of Crm (Andras Liptak, the lead developer of Perpetuum), so he contacted BoyC about creating a game. They started off together, and several friends and acquaintances joined the team over the months/years. The idea always was to create something that is our own, and isn't owned by some company where we're only employees. We wanted to be able to make a living of our passion.
V0rador: What are the inspirations of the developers when it comes to game mechanics, design soundtrack? Do you have particular movies, games, books you love and got your inspiration from?
Dev BoyC: Turns out the team is really like-minded, we're all sci-fi geeks in some form or another (nothing illustrates this better than the fact that Jr, one of the server coders has an alien facehugger tattoo grabbing his arm ;)), so the lore and the overall feel and ideas of the game come from this amalgam of combined sci-fi stuff that each of us brought to the table. We really liked the idea of building a game around futuristic and alien technology, and we depended on these ideas when designing a lot of the core game mechanics. Research, prototyping and manufacture are good examples of this.
V0rador: I would like you to tell us more about the game release. Shortly after the release you took the decision to "rollback" the game, could you explain how / why you came to this?
Dev BoyC: The switch to live mode brought with us a complex change that we couldn't test during the beta. We had a small glitch in the system which resulted in a few accounts with incorrect extension point values. Due to a number of factors coming together the problem escalated to a level where we decided that in order not to compromise the level playingfield on day 1, we'd do a rollback. It was a hard decision, and we extended the validity of each account in the system by 2 days as reimbursement. The system has been working flawlessly since, as all the other systems of the game have been rigorously tested during the 18 months of beta.
V0rador: It appears the situation is much better these days but recently from time to time in the safe areas, people are still having big "hicups" in the game due to lag and sudden increase of the ping. Are you making any progress on this? Could you explain to us what is the problem?
Dev BoyC: We had a system wide problem causing 10-15 second lag spikes on certain zones. The problem has been found and fixed, the disconnects some people encounter now originate outside our system, mostly due to network hiccups somewhere between our hosting and the client computer.
V0rador: On the official website, in the category media / concept art it appears everybody is dribbling on the mecha looking like a tank and the one looking like a panther. Can we expect to see these cool looking robots in the game in a close future? What can you tell us regarding this topic?
Dev BoyC: Those robots will definitely come someday, but we still need to make some gameplay and system changes happen before they do. For now the next new robot planned to be introduced will be a higher class hauler bot. The concept arts you referred to are from two complete tiers of machines that aren't in the game yet.
