Auto Assault: Ryan Seabury Interview at Gaming Nexus

Gaming Nexus has an interview up with Ryan "SamPenguin" Seabury, Lead Programmer for Auto Assault

GamingNexus: Your first game was Jumpgate, which I actually did some beta testing on. What are some of the lessons you learned from developing Jumpgate when moving to Auto Assault?

Ryan Seabury: We learned an enormous amount from developing Jumpgate - firstly, how incredibly difficult it actually is to get a massively multiplayer game "finished" and on the shelf. And then there's the whole making-people-aware-of-it thing! So, from a business perspective with Auto Assault, we made sure we found a publisher who takes the MMO business seriously. I don't think you're going to find many publishers as serious about online gaming as NCsoft is, and so far it's been a wonderful working relationship.

As for gameplay, I think our two biggest lessons from Jumpgate were 1- how important character identity is (Jumpgate had no avatars beyond your current space ship), and 2- there is such a thing as "too open ended".

To learn from our mistakes, first we are developing a much stronger sense of character identity and progression into Auto Assault. You have an avatar with some customization options, you can see heads and shoulders of your convoy mates and other players, and the character skills and attributes are being advanced in the RPG aspect of the game (aside from equipment load-outs on vehicles).

Second, we have a very content-heavy world design this time around. There will be a heavily scripted campaign for each of the three factions to play through for starters, in addition to blueprint crafting, arena battles, and faction-based PvP outpost battles. We also have a really in-depth map layering system we've been jokingly calling "rand-crafted" missions... short for random-handcrafted missions. This means that instead of randomly generating a few variables for non-story missions, we are actually going to be designing a huge pool of handcrafted missions which can be randomly selected from. In this way, we can still put some cool fiction around our random missions, and they can be a lot more interesting in mechanics.

Check out the full interview here.