Rock, Paper, Shotgun talks with NetDevil about their failed MMO Auto Assault and their upcoming space MMO Jumpagte Evolution:

RPS: How did the team feel in the aftermath of Auto Assault? What was learned from that project?

A lot! Honestly it could fill a book! Obviously after the game didn’t do as well as expected and was eventually turned off, that’s a very difficult thing to get through. As a team you end up spending years of your life working very long hours and when that doesn’t pay off the way you expect, then that’s certainly a painful thing. We ended up spending a lot of time thinking and evaluating why things didn’t go better and learned a lot of lessons from that which we are applying across the board. There’s probably a million things that contribute the success of a product but on a high level there’s a few big lessons which I think are important for MMO development. The first is to polish early, and not at the end. Numerous high profile game failures result directly from breaking this rule. The idea is that at the end of development you will always be in chaos, fire fighting mode - and if performance optimizations are thrown in with that as well, it’s not a very good scenario. The other problem is that if you don’t have a great looking, well running game early, then it’s really hard to evaluate how good the game really is. The “law,” if you will, is there’s no such thing as a good game with a bad frame rate.

RPG Vault visits NetDevil for the company's 10th anniversary and reports back with an update on its stable of games, including LEGO Universe and Auto Assault.

Announced in March of this year, LEGO Universe is a massively multiplayer online game that caught our attention immediately, although the information given out at that time was both general and sparse. Consequently, it was great to get a glimpse at the project last week. In the business world, the privately held brand of play materials is highly regarded for, among other things, its unwavering adherence to a set of core values centered on creativity, construction, problem solving and quality. The user base, which extends to more than 130 countries, is pretty broad, but is certainly weighted toward children. Since Jumpgate, Auto Assault and Warmonger all focus on combat and destruction, I was especially interested to see how NetDevil is approaching the design of this project.

Gamasutra has caught up with NetDevil's Scott Brown to discuss the company's four projects and the plans:

You’ve got four projects. Is that too many to work on?

Scott Brown: No, it’s not, because they’re not the same scale. If they were four, sixty-man teams, yeah. That would be way too much. But what we’re trying to do is balance a little bit between one massive team with everyone only focusing on one thing, and having a few smaller projects that are cool, creative outlets for people.

And we can take a little bigger risk on the smaller projects, too. It just costs so much money to make these games now, so you’ve got to take out as much risk as you can. It means games like Warmonger could never get made.

So what we’re doing is taking small teams and saying, ‘well, let’s try this idea.’ Let’s try something crazy like ‘what if everything in the world was destructible. What would that be like? How would that play?’ But of course it would require a super high-end computer to even be able to do the stuff we’re trying to do with it.

It’s okay to do that, if you don’t spend $15 million, or $50 million making it.

We’re working on Jumpgate now with a whole team revisiting that. And we’ll have a big announcement on what that actually is…soon. Jumpgate is another one of those games where people say, ‘well, space, it’s not one of the popular IPs, fantasy is what sells – are you sure this a good thing?’ It is for us. These are things we can be super-passionate about and really work on, without having to ramp up to hundreds of employees.

Multiplayer Online Games Directory talks to Scott Brown of NetDevil.

The conversation meandered toward Auto Assault. It's still chugging along. The team is now looking at different business models to find what is going to suit it best. They're also planning expansions and improvements on the game. It's a much smaller team, but they're always working on what's coming next. There were a lot of features that they weren't able to get into launch like the Auction House. They're able to include these features now after launch and they're always looking for ways to improve the user experience. It's now easier to get started and easier to play.  

WarCry has interviewed Scott Brown from NetDevil about their current games and future plans, including Warmonger and LEGO the MMO.  Here's a bit on Auto Assault:

You may recall a recent story about NetDevil working on a MMOG for a "major toy company" (link)...turns out the toy company is LEGO and here's the announcement:

The LEGO Group selects NetDevil to create branded MMOG

The LEGO® Group today announced it has commenced a working relationship with NetDevil® to develop a massively multiplayer online gaming experience to further engage its dedicated and active community.

“As children around the world continue to spend more time online we are developing new and engaging ways for them to interact with our brand,” said Lisbeth Valther Pallesen, Executive Vice President, Community, Education and Direct Division LEGO Group. “The LEGO brand represents construction, creativity and problem solving – values that compliment the MMOG market. By merging the online world of social interaction with physical play, the LEGO brand is providing new experiences for children, as well as fans. NetDevil’s technological capability, openness to work with a large community, and their enthusiasm for the LEGO brand made them a natural partner.”

“Playing with LEGO bricks and developing online worlds are both creative activities. To bring them together is deeply professionally satisfying and we look forward to working with the LEGO team,” said Scott Brown, President of NetDevil.

Kotaku has word of a conversation with NetDevil where they apparently informed them they would double the size of the studio to next year to accomodate work on a new project:

During the discussion they mentioned that they are looking to double, as in going from 50 to about 100, the size of the company next year. A large part of that, it seems, is due to a major new project they've landed. While they wouldn't spill any beans they did say it was a massively multiplayer online game for a "major toy company."

Cruising through the job openings there are some tantalizing bits of information. For instance the Gameplay Programmer they are looking for needs to be able to "craft the simplest yet most powerful components to facilitate in-game crafting and designing." In-game crafting you say?