First how did Clear Crown Studios itself come to be formed?

Clear Crown Studios started differently from a lot of other companies. We aren't made up of former industry insiders. We're just guys who like games. In fact, we've been the lone wolf outsider all along, even now. It started when I was talking with Sean Estipona, a friend of mine who had experience on the artistic side with modeling, animation, graphic design, those sorts of skills. I had been in the software industry for a long time in many different positions ranging from technical to marketing. After talking with Sean one day about family, fun, life, the universe and everything, we realized that we had both had a strong desire to make games and, together, we had both the technical and artistic skills to make it happen. To make a long story short, we started the company in 2003 with a goal to do things our own way and never looked back. As a small company, our biggest competitive edge is to be innovative. The larger the company, the more risk-averse they have to be. So our core strategy is to bring new ideas to gaming that you just can't find in any other games out there. Shattered Suns is a perfect example of that strategy.

How did the idea for Shattered Suns come about?

We're all RTS fans here and back in 2005, we felt like the genre had gotten a little too predictable. So, we wanted to do something completely new and innovative to spice up the RTS genre a bit. We looked around and saw that it had been a while since the last Homeworld came out and there was no sign of a sequel on the horizon. We're also big sci fi fans around here, so everyone got pretty excited about making a sci fi RTS set in space.

The next step was to figure out how we could really bring some seriously innovative killer features to the RTS genre. The big innovation we decided on was the ability to customize every unit. Every RTS game I've ever played has a set of canned units designed by the game designers. Not only are they canned, but they're the same units you've seen in half a dozen other RTS games. You have your infantry, your cavalry, your archers, your artillery, your builders, and your miners. Sometimes a game may use tanks instead of cavalry or riflemen instead of archers, but they're basically the same at heart. The game developers decide everything for you. They decide how much health the unit has, how powerful its weapons are, how far a unit's ranged weapons can travel. If you think about it, every single unit in an RTS game is just a combination of a few simple numbers--hit points, ranged attack points, melee attack points, how fast health recharges, and so on. So we asked ourselves, "What would happen if we put all those numbers in the player's hands?" That's when we decided on unit customization as the killer feature for the game. Honestly, I won't be at all surprised to see future RTS games start to adopt the same unit customization concept. It really adds a whole new dimension of strategic depth when victory or defeat depends on how well your unit designs compete with the AI's unit designs. And yes, the Shattered Suns AI does actually know how to learn and redesign its own units to counter your latest designs.

Aside from unit design being the killer feature, we also wanted to combine what makes space combat unique with what makes RTS games so popular and fun to play. We felt like there were really two sub-genres within space RTS games. On one side, you have the games like Homeworld that stay true to three-dimensional space, letting you fly in all three dimensions, but they throw out many of the RTS conventions. These games feel completely different from the rest of the RTS genre like Warcraft, Age of Empires, Command & Conquer, or Supreme Commander. Then on the other side, you have the space RTS games like Star Wars: Empire at War that stay true to the RTS genre, but throw out the third dimension and anything else that makes space a really cool battlefield. They're like land-based RTS games, only the land is invisible and there are lots of stars where the land should be. Otherwise, the game play is all two-dimensional. When we were designing Shattered Suns, we wanted to bridge the gap with a game that included pure RTS game play with the stuff that makes space cool and unique, like three-dimensional battles and orbiting planets and moons.

So, by the end of 2005, we had designed most of the major concepts you see now in Shattered Suns--custom units, true 3D space flight, orbiting planets and moons, and familiar RTS game play.

Can you give us a back story on the game's fictional background?

Sure. The story begins at the end. That is, the end of the second Imperial War, the largest interstellar war in the history of the known universe. At the end of the war, two empires have joined forces and divided every star system in every sector between themselves. Statia is the only sector that remains free. So, the player starts the single-player campaign by stepping into the shoes of the main character, Max, a captain for a Statian military space ship. In the very first level of the campaign, the Allied Empires invade Statia on two fronts and Statia surrenders, bringing the second Imperial War to an end. The problem is that Max's lover, who is also a fleet captain, is captured by one of the empires. Instead of surrendering his ship to the conquering empire, he goes underground and tries to find Seeng-Si, his lover. The more he tries to find Seeng-Si, the more he gets entangled with rebel groups who don't like the empires. Before long, he becomes a symbol of rebellion and hope for freedom. All the while, he really doesn't care about that. He just wants to find Seeng-Si. So, sometimes he's torn between his real personal mission and the political mission everyone assumes he's on. I don't want to give anything away, but suffice it to say there are some interesting plot twists in the story line along the way. This isn't a 1950's B movie plot. It's more of a 21st century story with some sharp edges, gritty reality, and moral gray areas.

Shattered Suns is going to have a different kind of single player campaign. What can you tell us about it?

Yes, the single-player campaign is very innovative. We wanted to tell a story with some depth, but we kept running into the same problems that plague most RTS games. That is, you just can't tell much of a story when all you have is short cut scenes before and after game play. A lot of RTS games have a common story formula: You start by watching a cinematic that explains why you still have to keep fighting, then you play a game level, then you end with a cinematic that explains why the fight still isn't over so you need to go to the next scenario in the campaign. I don't fault other RTS developers for bad storytelling, because it's excruciatingly difficult to fit a story with any depth into thirty-second cinematics. My hat's off to Blizzard and others who have done an amazing job of storytelling despite these limitations. Unfortunately, we're just not that talented here, so we knew we had to reinvent the entire formula somehow.

So, I was searching for a better way for us to tell an in-depth story and I decided to hold a marathon session of banging my head against the wall until the pain went away. That's when my wife, who pays the medical bills, decided to hold an intervention. She was the one who originally suggested using an instant messaging interface to let players "chat" with characters. The idea was interesting because it creates a sort of secondary game unto itself. You have a map showing all the sectors and star systems in the known universe. You decide where you want to go next and which game level you want to play next. If you can't win the next big battle yet, you can play smaller levels to gather recruits and resources that will help you in the next big battle. Or, you can just go through the main storyline and skip all the secondary stuff. Or, you can really immerse yourself in everything by exploring side characters and optional levels. At least that was the idea on paper.

The idea of an interactive, non-linear, IM-like campaign was very interesting, but it was also very risky since it's completely different from the norm. I floated the concept by a few other people here and everyone agreed it had a lot of potential to give the story more depth and make it more personal and engaging for players. So, since we're all about innovation, we moved forward with creating the IM interface.

Honestly, I was pretty stressed out about whether or not the IM concept would work. What if people hated it? It's text-heavy and people usually favor graphics over text. Also, what if people hated the story itself? If players didn't like the concept, we would have to go back into development for another year to crank out a more traditional RTS campaign. We didn't really know for sure if the concept would work until the most recent beta test. That's the first time anyone outside the company took the concept for a test drive.

Fortunately, the beta testers overwhelmingly liked the new IM style of campaign. At last count, something like 82% like the IM style in Shattered Suns at least as much as the more traditional RTS campaign style with 77% of those actually favoring it more. In the cynical world of gaming, you just don't get favorability numbers like that very often.

Frankly, the lesson I've learned from this experience is that we developers sometimes underestimate gamers, especially PC gamers. There's so much emphasis in this industry on prettier graphics and easier UIs and so little emphasis on depth of game play and storytelling. But PC gamers are also book readers and white collar professionals who solve all sorts of complex problems on a daily basis. They're big kids. They can handle more depth in storytelling, even if it means more text in the interface. And they can handle more strategic depth like custom-designing their own units. In fact, there's a whole class of them out there who really want that extra depth. Those are the people we've built Shattered Suns for.

The game will allow players to customize their own units. How will this work?

Very simple. You get ten ship classes you can design. So, instead of having a button that cranks out infantry and another button that cranks out cavalry, you have a button that cranks out a space ship based on ship class number one and another button that cranks out a space ship based on ship class number two, and so on. But before you click that button to build a Class 1 ship, you can change what a Class 1 ship is. You can make its engines faster, its cargo hold carry more resources, its weapons stronger. You can give it more miners to mine resources faster, or more builders to build new space stations faster. You can give it up to four different types of weapons on a single ship, everything from close-range drilling weapons to long-range blaster weapons. And you don't just pick from a list of canned weapons, either. You really have a lot of control. For example, if you're using a long-range blaster weapon, you decide how fast the weapon flies through space, how far away the ship's scanners can lock onto a target, whether the blasters use dumb plasma charges that just fly straight or guided missiles that actually chase after a moving target or beams that hit a target instantly for perfect accuracy. You even decide what kind of payload the weapon has. Obviously you can just damage the enemy with an explosive payload. But you can also upload a computer virus that makes the enemy self-destruct. Another virus turns off life support and puts the enemy vessel under your permanent control. There are shield jammers to take down enemy shields for a limited time, computer shockers to paralyze enemy ships temporarily, tractor waves to pull enemies into close range combat, and all sorts of other payloads you can use.

It may sound complicated, but customizing a ship design is actually very easy. You just pick which class you want to design and then change its settings from 0 to 10. A component at level 0 isn't included at all in your ship design. A level 10 component has maximum effectiveness. So, a ship with level 10 blaster power delivers maximum damage to enemies, while a ship with level 0 blaster power has no ranged weapon at all. So you just go through each component and increase or decrease the settings to whatever you want. When you're done, you can crank out as many ships using that design as you like by just clicking a build button, just like any other RTS game.

Another question we often get is about having to re-design ships. Short answer: You don't have to. Every time you play a game, your ship designs are automatically saved in your profile. So, when you find a set of designs you like, they stay with you from game to game to game. You don't have to re-design them every time you start a new game.

Click here for the second part of our Shattered Suns interview