WC: What is the backstory for Twin Skies?
It's a fantasy story based on two planets. Everybody was living in harmony until one day the last remaining humans in the galaxy, fleeing from some yet-to-be-decided terror, arrived and screwed everything up. A couple of years later one of the planets is in pieces, massive winged demons are flying everywhere, gelatinous cubes devouring villages, dogs and cats living together, I'm sure you get the idea.
You'll be able to choose between one of seven different races and over twenty character classes (that's what we have designed right now but its obviously subject to change). The MMO world is very open-ended however. You'll only touch upon the backstory for the first few days of play, but as you progress to higher level areas the quests will tie into the story a lot more.
WC: Where did you get your inspiration for Twin Skies?
80s fantasy films and cartoons. We're huge fans of Labyrinth and Thundercats, I shall say no more.
WC: Where did you get your inspiration for "monsters" in Twin Skies? That eleplant is absolutely cool! :)
Thanks! We have some really talented artists that split their time between working on scheduled content and creating random new concepts. Sometimes things come up that are too awesome not to put in the game, so we make a home for it. Right now we're thankfully at a phase where everybody in the company can contribute, nothing's set in stone.
WC: For whom are you developing Twin Skies? Would you categorize it as a "tweens-friendly" game?
We're not creating the game for any specific demographic at all, we just write what we think is funny and interesting, we'll see who picks up on it. It's certainly not going to be as cute as Neopets, and generally MMOs are harder to pick up than casual games. We're expecting to have a slightly older player base, probably 13-18. Then again we said that with Neopets, so who knows.
WC: Will there be "safe environments" for younger players?
Yes, we're aiming to include safe servers that have monitored chat, perhaps we'll limit players to pre-made phrases, we're not exactly sure how it's going to be done yet. We did learn at lot from our time at Neopets though, I set up the filtering and monitoring system there and it certainly evolved a great deal over the six years I was there.
