PotBS - Interview @ Ten Ton Hammer

Ten Ton Hammer chats with Flying Labs Software’s Lead Designer, Kevin Maginn.

Ten Ton Hammer: The second developer log “Swashbuckling Boarding” really describes, in detail, the sequence of events involved in a boarding encounter. This is incredibly exciting information! When did you know that actual avatar boarding could be accomplished, and when did it finally make its way into the client code?

Kevin: Drew spent months tuning and revising avatar combat based on weekly reviews, constant playtesting, and many hours put in on weekends.  I knew we could do boarding when that process started to wrap up, and the resulting avatar combat was essentially fun and interesting.  The technical side of boarding – which has to do with how the various game servers manage multiple combat environments that can all ‘talk’ to each other – took a very long time to get working.  After the system infrastructure was in place, we started iterating and polishing the actual encounter.  In that sense, ‘boarding’ as a distinct unit has been in the game since late March, but the key elements of the system – the avatar combat – have been working for quite a bit longer than that.