How did you guys develop the fictional back story for the game?

The game concept called for a zero gravity environment. This pretty much rules out anywhere on Earth as a game setting, so soon "where are the players fighting and why" became a pretty important question. We didn't want our game to get lost in the sea of sci-fi games, so we decided to do something different from what everybody else is doing and set the game close to home and in the near future.

This approach meant that the story would have to be grounded in reality. We looked for inspiration from current events around the world like news of war, public unrest, financial and ecological issues. Real-world space programs and astronomical events also heavily influenced the story and setting. I wrote the first draft of the back story in early 2008, followed by some vignettes - text "mood shots" if you like - to get the right feel for Shattered Horizon's game world.

How hard is it to develop a shooter that takes place totally in space and in a complete zero-g environment? Did you have to make up some gameplay design as you went along?

We purposefully kept our gameplay design lean and simple to compensate for the new challenges of zero gravity combat. After prototyping the controls and zero-g movement extensively, we knew we could pass the obvious hurdle of designing easy controls for six degrees of freedom. People we showed the game to were able to pick it up and play almost instantly.

The remaining big challenge was level design. We couldn't rely on prior art in level design - although we took whatever we could use - because a lot of the rules are based on limiting player access. That would have been contrary to our goal of a game with complete freedom of movement. We had to take some risks and make up new rules as we went along.
Our two-month closed beta test proved invaluable as a way to test and improve our level design process. The initial three beta levels were designed to encourage different types of zero gravity tactics. The latest versions of the levels, after several tweaks and changes based on beta tester feedback, have been very well received. We started off experimenting with different ideas, and ended up with a set of rules with which we can confidently design and create new zero gravity levels.

We introduced a new level during the beta, based on beta tester suggestions and our new design process, that proved the success of these new rules. Right now we're building new levels for the first content expansion.

Why was the decision made to make Shattered Horizon multiplayer only without any kind of single player campaign?

Since Shattered Horizon is our first title, we wanted to focus on one thing and do that well. We're also primarily self-funded, so keeping development cost down was an important consideration.

We've been told many times that the game world and setting of Shattered Horizon would support a single player campaign of epic proportions. It's definitely something we'll keep in mind.

We have read a few observations from folks who have played the beta version who feel that the game currently doesn't have a lot of content. What is your response to this?

I think you can read comments like that about many games. People complaining that a single player game is "only 10 hours long" for example. That's just people expressing their opinions and you'd never expect everyone to think the same.

What I would say is that, at one end of the scale, we had many players in the beta who put hundreds of hours into testing with some having played more than a thousand games each. We worked out that one guy had been playing for an average of 10 hours a day for seven weeks. At the other end, there were some beta testers who played for less than 10 minutes and never came back. When people comment on Shattered Horizon in forums, whether positive or negative, it's pretty easy for us to tell which group they came from.

Shattered Horizon is a very pure skill-focused multiplayer game and the price of $19.95 reflects that. Our beta testers tell us that we have got the price exactly right and we're seeing a positive reaction on many boards and forums.

Like I mentioned earlier, because Shattered Horizon is a multiplayer game we have committed to supporting the player community and that extends to offering free content updates to Shattered Horizon.