PAX08: Hermann Peterscheck interviewed on all things Jumpgate Evolution, page two
Massively: The flying and shooting felt really tight when we got to play it, did that take a lot of iteration to get just right?
Hermann: So just as a random example, just getting basic flight to where people could control the ship and fire at enemies and complete the first kill mission? That took about fifty or sixty iterations. Like one day, so you get somebody in and they test the game. They'd be like, "Um, I don't know if this is my target." So we make the target bigger, then we'll put the text over it and then we'll make it flash and make it spin. It took like, sixty of those. Then, there's the reaction time of moving the cursor and the ship following it. Those things take unbelievable amounts of time to get right, but it's really, really important. If you don't nail it you'll lose people right away. They're like, "Oh, I can't control the game, I'm out."
Massively: Control-wise you guys nailed that, because it took us a minute of fiddling around with the game to figure it out. Anyone familiar with shooters of any kind on the PC will be able to figure it out.
Hermann: It's weird. You'd think that it would be easy to do because intuitively we're gamers and so we should know, but you've just got to test, test, test and test. It's the only way to get controls right, I'm convinced of it. Same with the camera. Just getting the camera to follow you directly. It's a real pain, it takes forever, but you gotta do it.
Massively: Yeah, we noticed that the camera is a little loose, but not so loose that you get confused when you're moving around. Also, your ship isn't glued to the center of the screen and the camera isn't glued onto the ship so there's a little bit of wiggle when you move around and it feels really natural.
Hermann: We tried all kinds of stuff. Like we had the fixed camera, that was the first step and it was terrible. Then we moved the camera a little bit and it was weird. So the programmer re-did the control scheme probably four of five times from scratch and he ended up with a spring system. If you imagine springs on the edges of the screen, you can kind of see what I'm saying. You can see it kind of pulling and all we have to do is tune the springs and that's how we get tightness and looseness, but that was the result of many, many iterations. So you can see I'm in an asteroid here, fighting. So just thinking about FPSes, fighting in close quarters is kind of a staple. So, you know we wanted to have that experience in the game as well.
Massively: We see you're fighting inside of a very large-- well, it's almost like a Planetoid, actually.
Hermann: It's giant asteroid with caves in it. We want to keep pushing on this area, like trying to make little interactive instances like that.
