Void War was recently released by Rampant Games and we were able to catch up with Jay Barnson to get a few questions answered about this space thriller.

1. Before we get going, who is Rampant Games and the team that worked on Void War?

Jay Barnson - founder, lead programmer, designer. Jay previously worked on several Playstation, Dreamcast, and PC games including Twisted Metal, Jet Moto, Warhawk, Animorphs, and ECW 2: Anarchy Rulz!

John Olsen: programmer. John also has worked on several Playstation, PC, and X-Box titles including Jet Moto 2, Streak, Animorphs, and Links 2003.

Matt Barnson: Musician (and Jay's brother)

George & James McEwan: Modelers. And Brothers.

Kelly Olsen: Web Design and 2D icons

We also received help from contractors & companies on other parts of the game, such as sound effects and 2D art. All of us did Void War as a part-time effort: Rampant Games has no full-time employees (though during the last few months of Void War's development, it had become a second full-time job for me!)

-------------------------

2. For those unfamiliar with Void War, how do you describe it to them?

Void War is a Single- and Multiplayer 3D Space Dogfighting game. It is sort of a merger between the space combat "sim" and a first person shooter. With busy, obstacle-laden environments (space stations, asteroid fields, space junkyards, etc), and a hint of Newtonian physics, Void War emphasizes the need to fly as well as fight. If you remember the great-granddaddy of all computer games, "SpaceWar," and its derivatives such as Asteroids and Star Control - and turn that into a 3D game putting you in the pilot seat - that's Void War.

-------------------------

3. What influenced you to create Void War?

I was a huge fan of the 3D space combat "sims," ever since playing "Starfire" (and later, Star Wars) in the arcades. I was also a fan of multiplayer flight sims - I loved getting into dogfights with living, intelligent opponents - as well as cooperating with them on joint missions again AI opponents. I was really excited when the first multiplayer space combat sims started coming out - but I found them to be dissapointing. While the big missions were fun, when you broke it down into individual, 1-on-1 dogfights it was boring. I wanted to play something where you could just get into a pure furball with multiple players that was just as fun as a World-War II era combat flight sim.

I also felt like modern space combat games were getting too complex - overloading the player with things he had to do rather than 'going deep' and offering greater challenge to a smaller set of skills. I looked back beyond the 'sims' of the previous decade and looked at the old 2D space combat shooters for inspiration there - like the Star Control series, Spacewar, Asteroids, Omega Race, Starcastle, Space Duel, and countless others.

Void War was my answer.

-------------------------

4. As a space shooter Void War has to compete against some of the more noteworthy Indie games available including the critically acclaimed Starshatter and the Star Wraith series that has gone through many generations of tweaking it to near perfection, what made you decide to do a game of this type considering the competition that you face?

Idiocy and Ignorance! Void War predated my research into the indie gaming scene. I originally started working on it "just because." The game I had imagined had never been attempted, and the big publishers had all but abandoned the genre. I got tired of waiting for someone else to create it. I originally set my sites fairly low, and just imagined sort of a 3D Spacewar with a few more modern trappings and design values. I also thought the whole project would just take me about three months.

It took a little longer, and at one point I nearly gave up on the project because the gameplay just wasn't working. After putting it on the shelf for a couple of months, I cracked it open again, and started figuring out how to make the game simple and fun. Once I hit upon the answers, I started thinking seriously about turning my little hobby project into a commercial product. That was when I started seriously looking at the indie community and getting help to finish the game. That was when I discovered that I wasn't alone among the indies trying to revive the Space Combat Sim genre!

The thing is, even had I known, I'd have still done Void War. Each of us have a very different twist on the genre, and the truth is there are still a LOT of different things that can be done with it - we've only scratched the surface. Void War is very different from everything else in the genre.

-------------------------

5. What aspects of Void War set it apart from other space shooter games such as the ones mentioned?

Everything in Void War is designed to enhance the 'flying and fighting' elements of space combat. The physics model is unique to the genre --- though we really just took something similar to the old 2D shooter arcade games and put it in a 3D environment. The idea was to give you a taste of Newtonian physics - force you to plan your changes of direction and flight in advance as much as you can. By itself, it wasn't enough to make a difference, but when combined with everything else, it changes the game tremendously from anything out there.

Secondly, we set the game in 'loosely enclosed,' busy environments. The Void Points are enclosed by an anti-gravity field that gently pulls you back into the arena once you stray too far. And the arenas themselves are FULL of obstacles and "gravitational anomalies" that provide you with interesting "terrain" in space. You don't have wide-open empty space in Void War --- ironically, there's not much void there. At first, I thought that all these asteroids, space stations, debris, hyper-gravity wells, and other elements would just be hazards the player would have to dodge (made tricky by the whole inertia thing with the physics). But in reality, these are the very things that keep you alive --- without obstacles to dodge around or give you an edge, you can be torn apart in wide-open space.

Thirdly - and perhaps most controversially (in my mind, at least) - we added "pick-ups" in space. I was against this idea at first - this was something from first-person shooters, not space combat simulations! But after I went ahead and put them in, we noticed what a HUGE difference they made. With the physics model, it's not trivial to just 'grab" a pick-up as you pass by (though it's not very hard in the beginner ships). They make a very nice reward and benefit for players with real piloting skill.

-------------------------

6. A huge game-play aspect to Void War is definately its online play, what was the most difficult part of creating the online portion of Void War?

It's funny - the coolest 'features' in a game are often the easiest to implement. The overall networking code and the 'match-making' server on the website that lets people find online games to play were really pretty easy. The difficult and painful stuff is the stuff you don't think about... like having bots replace a player when he leaves the game, or transitioning players from death to delay to respawn states so that they are coordinated the same on all the clients. We had an annoying problem for a long time where players would respawn twice, because the client couldn't send the server an acknowledgement that he'd respawned fast enough, and the server would send multiple respawn messages (but in different locations).

-------------------------

7. With Space shooters I always find myself struggling to get my bearings, what have you done with Void War to ensure that gamers will feel in control of their craft in their surroundings?

That's a really tough one - and we've done a lot to address it.

We have some HUD instrumentation to help you - radar displays, off-screen target indicators that show you where to turn, and 3D velocity and gravity indicators. We also added lots of particles of "space dust" that give you an often unconscious hint of how fast and in what direction you are moving. The obstacles in space - the "space terrain" elements - really help in a lot of cases. And we offer two third-person views.

Another key element is that we kept the battlefields small with the barrier field surrounding the void points. So you rarely have problems with things being too far away to see them clearly.

I'm still not perfectly satisfied with how we handled things, but I think we've made it easier.

-------------------------

8. What do you expect those who play Void War to come away thinking/feeling?

We really focused on fun in this game. It's not the next big space epic with elaborate missions and expensive cut-scenes. We really wanted it to be more of the thinking-person's shooter: an action game with 'sim' style elements for depth, and a sense of humor. The goal is to make space dogfighting as interesting, deep, and challenging as possible. Everything else just provides a context for it.

Hopefully people who play Void War will feel this is a game they can jump into, have a blast and an adrenaline rush in a few rounds of dogfights against the AI or other players, but always feel that they can improve their ability with more practice.

-------------------------

9. What was been the most ambitious aspect of creating Void War?

The unusual design - with physics and FPS elements - was pretty ambitious, and so I really want to claim that. But making a game that had multiple single-player and multiplayer game modes from scratch was something that I might have avoided as a launch project if I knew then what I know now.

-------------------------

10. What aspect of Void War do you think gamers will appreciate the most?

What I *HOPE* they will appreciate is the thrilling multiplayer game. Unfortunately, a lot of people will only play the game single-player - and I think they are missing more than half the game by doing that.

------------------

Complete this sentence: I will be perfectly happy with the release of Void War if...

If some time in the very near future I can log in and see several multiplayer servers running at one time, full of people blowing each other to bits!

-------------------------


A big thanks to the Rampant team and Jay Barnson who was generous enough to take the time and answer a few of our questions. If you haven't played it already, you can download the demo from the Rampant Games website or the Void War website.