Game Chronicles Magazine

Features:

Two different multiplayer modes allow you to prove your skill against the best pilots in the Galaxy (or at least on the Internet).
Single-player modes include a free-for-all practice mode, and a campaign game sends you on an adventure through deadly battlefields against unique opponents.
Intense 3D battlefields in space - fly and fight through asteroid fields, space stations, and bizarre deep-space anomalies. Whip around hyper-gravity wells and coast past your enemies.
Six unique spacecraft to master, each with their own strengths, weaknesses, and special abilities.
Lethal "Boss" enemies will challenge your skills to the utmost in campaign mode.
Fast action, with easy-to-learn controls.

Game Chronicles takes a look at this exciting new game with an exclusive interview by John Carswell.

GCM: Thank you for your time. Would you care to start us off by introducing yourself and telling us about the team behind Void War?
Jay Barnson: I’m Jay Barnson, founder of Rampant Games and designer for Void War. I have worked in the games industry since 1994. I was one of the original team members at SingleTrac, and worked on many best-selling titles there, including Warhawk, and theTwisted Metal and Jet Moto series, amongst other titles. I also worked at Acclaim on their wrestling series.
Rampant Games was formed last year as an independent game development studio. Our team consists of both industry veterans and newcomers to the field. John Olsen is another SingleTrac alumni, with credits there and at Microsoft including Jet Moto 2, Streak, Animorphs, and Links 2004. One of our modelers gained his professional experience doing CAD engineering, and the other from designing graphics for television commercials. Our composer has worked in the games industry before, but as a network engineer. He was thrilled to put his ‘hobby’ experience as a musician and a songwriter to the task in a game (and has also helped us a bit on the networking and the technical operation of the website -- a nice bonus!)

GCM: Firstly, will there be a plot driving Void War’s gameplay?
Jay Barnson: We have a plot. It’s a stellar -- unbelievably brilliant… well, no. Actually it’s kind of hackneyed. That was part of the fun. It’s the characters who find themselves in this fairly stereotypical storyline that make it so fun. Our hero, Lance Dawson, is pretty much average everyday hard-bitten veteran turned mercenary who has all the luck of coming across the most lethal bunch of weirdoes the universe has to offer. Like the yuppie executive who tries hardball negotiations to get people to invest in his mercenary corporation. Or an alien who only speaks English learned from bad translations of Japanese videogames. And a paranoid-delusional war-buddy whose idea of shielding is wearing a tin-foil hat.

GCM: How would you best describe Void War’s gameplay?
Jay Barnson: Dogfighting in space! Only cooler. If space was really crowded with asteroids and space stations and wrecked spacecraft for you to crash into. And tiny miniature black holes that sucked you into them and spit you out again. And… well, that should give you an idea.

GCM: Please tell us a bit about the ships and weapons that will be available to the player.
Jay Barnson: There are six playable ships (plus a few really nasty ones reserved by the AI --- we tried to talk them into sharing, but they started shooting at us, so we had to back off). Each ship has different performance parameters in terms of speed, handling, acceleration, shield strength, blaster positioning, etc. Good stuff for a stats-fan like me to sink his teeth into. They are broken into three categories – Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced -- mainly based on their difficulty to fly. The Advanced ships are capable of doing some really amazing things that are frankly impossible for the beginner ships to pull off, but the beginner ships are a lot easier to fly because of their more limited handling.
The primary weapon of each ship is blasters -- Void War is mainly a game about shooting the other guy out of the sky with blasters. There are variations in energy usage, positioning, sequencing, etc -- stuff you’ll need to master in order to be really dangerous in each ship. But each ship also has one special ability that really sets it apart from the others. The Nighthawk, for example, has a hyperspace jump ability (a nod to a few early-80’s space shooters….). It can jump out of danger to a random location almost instantly. The Renown, on the other hand, has a “Vampire” attack that drains a nearby enemy of energy to augment its own. You can only use these attacks every so often, but knowing how and when to use them most effectively is key to winning – not to mention really frustrating your opponents in multiplayer!
In addition, there are missiles. Now, Void War is mainly a game about shooting the other guy out of the sky with blasters --- so all but one of the standard missile types do absolutely ZERO damage to the other ship! Instead they cripple him in some way to allow you to either set up your killing shot, or maybe allowing you to extend an escape. Either way, you aren’t going to win the game using missiles alone --- they are mainly there to augment your gunnery, not replace it.

GCM: What can you tell us about the A.I. that players will be up against in Void War?
Jay Barnson: They are crack shots. We had to tone them way down so that they’d miss once in a while. Try to keep some kind of obstacles – even an asteroid they may blow up in a couple of shots – between you and them at all times. If they manage to sucker you out into the open, particularly ganging up on you, you are dead meat unless you are flying a ship with a nice defensive special ability, like they Nighthawk’s hyperspace ability.

GCM: Please tell about Void War’s controls and physics.
Jay Barnson: Controls – we tried to simplify controls over the schemes found in other, more ‘simulation’-style space combat games. Not that I don’t love sims, but in Void War the complexity is intended to come out of the physics and the environment, not by having a confusing control scheme. The main controls are only to turn, accelerate, and shoot (blasters, missiles, and your ship’s special ability). We also have a key to lock onto a new target. And for really advanced players, you have three buttons to optimize your ships power allocation priorities – to emphasize your engine power regeneration over how fast your lasers recharge, for example, if you need to get out of Dodge in a hurry.
Physics – we had fun here. The physics of space combat in Void War are vaguely reminiscent of the old “Asteroids” and similar arcade games. Ships have inertia – they don’t stop on a dime when you turn. It’s not 100% realistic physics – after all, reality can be kind of boring. But you do have to figure on a certain amount of ‘slide’ when you turn your ship. This can be hard when you are dodging blasters, threading your way through a space junkyard trying to snag a reload of missiles. We also have some objects that exert gravitational forces that push or pull your ship around a bit on the battlefield. Developing precise control over your ship’s flight path is a skill that can definitely take a while to master – especially for the Advanced ships.

GCM: How long will it take the average gamer to complete Void War and what do you view as adding replay value?
Jay Barnson: The single-player campaign can be pretty hard, but it’s not time-consuming. I’ve played the whole thing start-to-finish in under an hour. I was using a special developer cheat-code, though, because I was TESTING and not really playing, Playing it all the way through takes longer – the AI can be nasty – but we have a really nice save-game system that lets you save at your current level AFTER you get blown up. The levels are short, so you don’t lose much progress. We figure that’s when you usually think about saving your game, anyway…. AFTER you need to do it. So we just take a little shortcut and say, “Hey, you really wanted to save before that happened, didn’t you? Go ahead. We won’t tell anybody you didn’t think ahead and save before getting into big trouble.”
Maybe it’s because I just hate having to repeat progress over and over again with more traditional save-game systems. Or doing the whole “save-step-save-step” thing.
Replay value – well, we have a lot of things to add replay value. First off, there’s a good, old-school retro SCORE. You can go for a higher score. You get bonus points for blasting asteroids and finishing under the time limit. Then we have difficulty level. I’ll confess right now I haven’t been able to beat the game at Advanced difficulty level. Yet. I get beaten like an egg.
And of course we’re planning possible updates and expansions to Void War. But that’s not as important as what the game comes with “out of the box” – and that’s in the multiplayer mode (and the single-player ‘free-for-all’ practice mode). As proud as I am of our cute little story-driven, semi-tongue-in-cheek campaign mode… the multiplayer game is where it’s really at. Playing real, live players online is a blast. Even when they all gang up on me because they are annoyed at me shredding them all repeatedly…

GCM: As an independent developer, what unique hurdles have presented themselves while creating a game such as Void War?
Jay Barnson: Besides having a shoestring budget, or coming to grips with the fact that you have to keep your content down to a size smaller than a single audio track would use on a CD-ROM game? Gee, where do I begin?
One of the first things that pop into mind is that as an independent, you have really are independent – on your own. That means you are responsible for all the jobs that you used to blithely leave to your publisher to take care of for you. That’s a lot of extra work – work that takes away from your finishing-your-game time.
Another issue is that, especially working on a 3D action game as we are, is that you get held to the same standard as a AAA game that took a millions of dollars and dozens of man-years. Nobody’s going to look at your game and say, “Wow, that’s the best game I’ve ever seen that was developed for a budget of under $50,000 and 1 year of development time.” The consumer doesn’t CARE about that. They care about the biggest bang for their gaming dollar. This means that the indie game maker has to develop a laser-sharp focus of his resources on What Matters Most in his game to provide a superior (or at least DIFFERENT) entertainment experience for his customer as all these other games with huge budgets. It’s a harsh reality, but that’s life. It can take adjusting to, especially when you come from the other side of the business where you can address almost anything (up to a point) by throwing money & resources at it, and really forces you to think long and hard about what’s REALLY going to matter to the customer.

GCM: Above all else, what do you feel will separate Void War apart from other games in its genre?
Jay Barnson: Gameplay, Gameplay, Gameplay! Void War provides a space combat experience that is very different from anything else in the genre. It’s a hard thing to show to the consumer – it doesn’t come out in screenshots, or even our trailer video. But it’s a totally unique gaming experience that you can share with friends in online matches – something I’m really excited about.

GCM: Lastly, please tell us a bit about the Void War’s graphics.
Jay Barnson: We’re serving multiple masters in the graphics engine for Void War. Part of our effort to make the game more ‘accessible’ means making sure it is playable by someone who doesn’t necessarily have the hottest gaming rig on the planet. But you can only take that so far before your game starts looking like… well, an old 80’s arcade game. We settled on something kind of middle-of-the-road. If your computer would have been considered pretty hot stuff four years ago, then you should have no problem playing Void War.
We’re using some nice multitexturing effects – like using environment mapping so you can see a reflection of the galaxy on the surface of the shinier ships.
For the engine effects, we wanted something that gave a more retro, visceral kick. We used (abused) particle systems for generating the flame effects for that old-school rocket-ship look. The other advantage that gives over the more modern, cleaner flame effects or abstract ‘ion trails’ you often see is that the movement of the flame particles telegraphs a ship’s current changes in motion much better to opposing players who are trying to line up a shot.
The “HUD” (Heads-up Display) and instrumentation was something we really struggled with. We could have gone the more high-tech, translucent look that with LOTS of displays cluttering up all sides of the screen as is popular. But we were really shooting for something simpler and more retro… less Star Trek: The Next Generation and more Buck Rogers.

GCM: Thank you again for your time! Do you have any last thoughts or impressions that you like to leave our readers with?
Jay Barnson: With the viability of Internet distribution for games, I really do think we’re entering into a really exciting era of game development… one that resembles the “golden age” of the early 80’s with all the good and bad that comes with that. The important thing to me, as a gamer and consumer, is that it empowers me to not restrict my choices to the predictable, safe, ‘mass-market’ fare that’s normally found on the shelves of Wal*Mart or GameStop. Not that you can’t still find some great games there. But the cool thing for me is that there’s a tremendous amount of variety that’s becoming available – games that cater to more specialized tastes, or games that are willing to take risks that no major publisher in their right mind would allow with their $4 million investment. Now the consumer has greater power to vote with his wallet for the types of games he really wants to see. I’d like to encourage players to get out there and explore some of what’s out there just off the beaten path. You may be pleasantly surprised, as I was.

GCM: Thank you again for your time. What final impressions would you like to leave our readers with?
Jay Barnson: Forget horror movies, be part of the real terrifying action as it unfolds in front of your very own eyes.