ryne-anderson
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Meet the Sparkplay Media team: Part Two, pg. 2
Massively: Is there any MMO that has influenced your work on Earth Eternal, and if so how did it influence you? Ryne Anderson, programmer: Absolutely! One of the most enjoyable aspects in working with games is digging into the titles that you really enjoy and seeing if you can't make them a bit better by throwing your own unique spin on them. Of note, World of Warcraft has been my shining beacon throughout the project. The simplicity of getting a player into the action opened the floodgates to people who might have previously been intimidated by the stigma that MMO's were for 'hardcore' players. Earth Eternal aims to not only meet, but exceed the accessibility of the current 3D MMOs, by not requiring a monthly subscription or up-front payment to play– all within a very polished game world that you can play in a browser. What Earth Eternal race represents you the best and why? Ryne: Being a technical guy myself, it is without a doubt the Clockwork. First and foremost, his look is amazingly different from all of the other races in Earth Eternal. Secondly, let's face it: robots are awesome! (Unfortunately though, I can't be a robot ninja in Earth Eternal...yet.) If you could pick out your favorite part of Earth Eternal, what would it be and why? Ryne: As hinted above, I'm really into accessibility for any type of player. To me, if we can get a player, from seeing our webpage, to in the game killing monsters in five minutes or less, that's a huge win for both us and the player. I believe we have succeeded in this, as our intro area not only looks beautiful, but gets players into the action right away. What has been the most difficult obstacle for you to overcome in your work on Earth Eternal? Ryne: Making any sort of game is always a learning process, and sometimes simple issues turn out to be much larger when you try to lay out all the details. For me, the most difficult part of making an MMO is keeping the client and server in sync at all times. It's a trade-off between being responsive to the commands issued by the player and validating that they are actually allowed to do those commands on the server. What are some of the limitations/problems you encounter when coding for both a client and a browser-based game? How have you guys overcome that? Ryne: Honestly, getting the game running in the browser isn't a monumental task. It requires a bit of touch-up every time a new browser version comes out, but the plugin we have is fairly solid. The difference between the browser and client version are pretty minimal. Having said that, since we are running in a browser we want the game to be able to run on as many computers as possible, and optimizing for all sorts of different configurations is always quite a challenge.Thank you so much to the Sparkplay Team for lending the time to answer our questions! If you're interested in Earth Eternal or would like to put your name into the hat for the closed beta, stop by their website!
