Incidental Details

That's a long story. First of all this game was Beyond, developed by a small group of people, then it was sold to CDV, then CDV thought it was a good idea to buy the licence for Imperium Galactica III and put it behind this game, which I didn't think was a good idea. I never liked it too much because it was already a game, we already had some elements, it was already a universe with a story, and it had no connection to the Imperium Galactica series. We had to fit in a lot of exploring elements like colonising and a lot of things. This 3D engine is not for that, this graphical system is not for that, this graphical system is for controlling one to ten units, not an unlimited number of units; it's impossible, it was impossible.

It is very, very hard to do something to put these things together, and when we finally finished putting these things together they decided to cancel the project because they had some financial problems. They lost the licence, then they changed the name to that stupid name... Erm... ["Galaxy Andromeda," we offer.] I think this is the most stupid name of human history! [Smiles] But okay, that happened. I wouldn't say that they never asked us about this game because they asked us, we told them 'No way', and they changed it. And then the project was cancelled, and we found a connection to HD [Interactive, publisher] and we finally started the game in the original, tactical form, not exploring.

Yes, definitely. It's a good feeling because this is a game very close to our hearts. For all of the development team, especially for the core of the development team, this game is much more than a game. It's some kind of self-development, a very personal project. It's some kind of an art to them. They want it to be the best. We put in a lot more than was required to make it something that we can be proud of.

First of all I think that all developers would like to be in science fiction or fantasy games, but the publishers don't like to have too much fantasy or science fiction games without licences. It's all about brands. Every developer would love to do it. It's not about why we wanted to do it, it's that we had a chance to do it; that's the most important part. They are all science fiction fans, that's the reason.

I am sure that all of us - not just me, but the whole team - were influenced by various things. You cannot see too much of my own influences [various Eastern European authors] in this game, directly, but I think for this game the Star Trek Next Generation series, Babylon 5, and if there was a game that influenced me it was Shogan: Total War because of the tactical details.

First of all the DirectX 9 technology, which I think is not used in space games yet, and the ship design I think stands out. I know some games which are on a high level of visual quality, like in EVE, the ship design is good, but in most games - like Freelancer - the ship design is very basic. I wouldn't say things like EVE influenced us though because we started so long before them.

In total it is four years if you count from the very starting point, from Beyond. In terms of how long we've been with HD, it's probably around nine months.

I think first that everyone coming to the game should decide what sort of player he is. If I'm just interested in the story, I want to play through the game and I don't want to have too much tactical challenge, and I don't want to learn everything and I don't want to do micromanagement (which the Germans, for example, love to do) then I should play the game on beginner level and I can play through the whole game without using the extra controls. However, if I wish, I can change. I personally think that the best way to play the game is to start on beginner level, playing through to the first or second episode - you will learn a lot - and you will start to use the extra controls, and then maybe you can restart and try and win using the more advanced controls, because the missions always have primary objectives that you need to complete to advance but also secondary objectives that are not required but can be completed for extra reward, like prototype devices and your crew gaining more experience than otherwise.

As far as I know, we are not planning that, but it can be changed at any time. It's a publisher decision rather than a developer decision.

You can make huge modifications; it's definitely mod-friendly. It's not absolutely user-friendly like Age of Empires where you can create your own scenarios really easily. Here you could create your own units, and with some programming experience or game designing experience you could create a Star Wars mod or a Star Trek mod, which absolutely look like they are supposed to.

As far as I know they will be on the disc when the game ships, and we will write about new mods on the website when they come out.

We had no problems with the publisher, which is surprising. It was absolutely a perfect relationship that's good, that we like. In game design terms the most difficult thing was to make the space interesting; to make it interesting while keeping the feeling of reality. Because obviously we couldn't change everything to have something like, I don't know, a sea of flames up there, down there, round there. So to keep it realistic but make it interesting was very difficult.

A lot! First of all, the NPCs are always talking to you about other things, but we hadn't time to create missions that won't be played by all of the players, which means that now the mission tree is linear. The first thing I think I would change would be to make some non-linearity in the mission structure, but it would take a lot of extra time. We had a lot of ideas for more tactical things. But the other big thing would be to enable the player to fly the fighter from the cockpit; that's something I would love to see in this game.

Yes.

We have plans, but of course it depends on the publisher.

No. We just finished it so everyone's on holiday. Except me.