Interviews

A 19 years old lone wolf named Matt and two game projects... sounds too good to be true? Check this interview out!

Q: How many polygons are you using for the cars in Natio? How many polygons can we display at the same time on the screen, from your experience?

A: The cars in Natio are built up from several models. The body for all of the cars on average is just around 550 polygons, seats are around 130 polygons, windows are around 60 polygons, the wheels actually consisted of the most polygons being on average 2550 per set of 4. So total each car has about 3300 polygons. Since I knew that there is only going to be 2 cars visible pretty much the whole time that's only around 7000 polygons being displayed, which I consider a small amount. I have tested a view consisting of around 5 of these cars visible at once without any noticeable frame rate drop, so you can definitely have a game with many more cars than I have (and if you want more cars, just take care to reduce the amount of triangles per each car, and vice versa). I don't think it's so much of how detailed the models are, it's the amount of objects and scripts running that seem to bog down the frame rate from my experience.

Q: How will we be able to customize the cars? What parts can be changed depending on how much money we win?

A: There are 2 ways you can customize the cars in Natio. You can customize the way it looks and the performance. For looks, if you go into the garage you can change anything from the paint color, window tinting, seats, to stuff like the ride height, rims, tire sizes, etc. Each car has 15 options that can be changed to get the desired look you want. As for performance, basically the "beginner" cars can only be customized so much, the better the car you get, the more further you can modify and add parts, increasing performance. For example the cheapest car has 6 possible upgrade slots, while the most expensive car has 24 possible upgrade slots. When you win money from races you can go to the parts area where you can upgrade/purchase parts from. Most of the upgrades/purchases will yield more horsepower, clutches for example let the clutch engage faster, giving you quicker 1/4 mile times.

Q: Please give us a few details about the global scoreboard system.

A: When ever you race and have beat your old 1/4 mile time record, you are given an option if you would like to post your score on the global scoreboard (you can choose not to as well). This global scoreboard can be viewed in-game or over the web from my website. The in-game scoreboard will only show the top 10 records, but if you view it on the website it will show every entry that has been submitted. This way you can see who are the top players and if you are good enough, you would get your name posted.

Q: Can we buy Natio now?

A: Yes :-) you can buy it at http://mahonroy.home.comcast.net/natio.htm as I did make this game as a hobby and originally did not intend on selling it, I decided to sell it for $9.95.

Q: What type of game is Lucrum? And what makes is special?

A: Lucrum is a space exploration type game. I would say that it would most closely resemble the types of games like Star Control, Ur-Quan Masters, etc. You start out with a basic ship, fuel, and a little bit of money and that's pretty much it. You can fly around to different planets and land on them (its not like you just select a planet and click land and you are there, you can actually fly through the atmosphere and everything). On planets some have different kinds of materials that you can harvest, and some planets even have alien lifeform, some hostile, and some not. Certain planets can have harsh conditions also such as temperature, and weather. Generally the closer to the star they are, the more hotter they are. Also, the further away the planets are from where you start out, the more valuable things you can find, but the more danger you encounter increases also. The materials that you harvest can be sold at space stations for money, which you can use for a number of things. You can upgrade your ship (around 90 modifications

that can be done). You can also upgrade your space suit, weapons, harvest tools, etc. The items you have are more organized, like an RPG where you have an inventory, and can place items on slots to "install" them. What makes Lucrum so special is that the area at which you can play in is huge, lots of different ships to discover (around 30), and the map is generated by some pretty complex scripts which will set up where space stations are, solar systems, different kinds of suns, asteroid belts, etc. and that will also assign names to these, so I don't have to sit there and place every single object, I have it set up now to generate a map that consists of around 300 planets, there is a lot more content than most games of this genre.

Q: You state that we will be able to fly for 75 minutes from one side of the map to the other. How big (in quants) is the world and what tricks did you use in order to make it that big?

A: The total area of space that you are allowed to explore is about 80,000 quants by 66,000 quants. Because I am limited in the amount of space I have, I had to scale everything down extremely small. At first it only took about a minute and a half to reach the other side of the map, where one of the main features I wanted was for a huge area of gameplay, so this was obviously needing to be fixed. I was then able to scale it down about 10 times and took more care into how the code worked. I then started running into some problems making everything so small such as since everything is small, I am relying more on really small decimal numbers instead of "normal" sized numbers, like movement vectors for example. Since the movement vectors were getting so small, the engine would start truncating them. After going through my code I was able to fix lots of the distortion problems and was able to scale it around 50 times smaller than it originally was, which yielded a huge area of gameplay, that when I tested it and flew a ship across the entire map took 75 minutes (and no I didn't just sit there holding down the arrow key staring at the screen for 75 minuets, I propped up the key and used a stopwatch). Under normal gameplay conditions you wouldn't be allowed to fly for that long, as you would run out of fuel way before.

Q: Your game will allow us to get out of the ship and explore the planets. How big is a regular planet?

A: When flying around and viewing planets from a distance they aren't too scaled. If your ship took up we'll say an area the size of an icon for example, the planet would range from taking up half of the screen, to

several screens long. When you fly the ship towards the planet and enter the atmosphere the planet then gets a lot larger. An average size planet takes about 1 minuet to walk across, you can explore as far away as you want from where you landed your ship, but I didn't want to make it too big so that its too time consuming walking back to the ship after you are done doing whatever it is you are doing.

Q: What type of AI system are you using in Lucrum?

A: There are basically 2 different kinds of AI in Lucrum. Other ships flying around in space, which can consist of aliens / humans wanting to trade with you, ships minding their own business, ships that are looking for week ships to destroy, etc. The ships can also use a few tactics while fighting you, such that they can lead you when using weapons against you and can try and avoid weapons that you fired at them (depending on their skill level and ships). The other type of AI is very similar but is for alien lifeforms on the planets instead.

Q: Please give us a few tips for beginners.

A: Well, most people say to start small and work your way up... When I first started programming I would come up with these elaborate complicated games and would get like 1% into the project when realizing that its way out of my element. What I would recommend is take some really simple yet fun ideas for games (like brickles, card games, puzzles, things that aren't too complex) and try and make a game similar to that for practice / starters. I think it's so much better to have a simple game that's 100% complete than 20 games that are only 5% complete (for obvious reasons). But after making a couple of simple ones and learning how to use the tools then move up, and you will eventually be able to understand the tools and make those elaborate complex games you were thinking about before.

Thank you a lot, Matt.