Morten from the War World team kindly agreed to answer some questions for us about his amazing game.

If you want some more information about War World you can read our review


1)War World is amazingly polished and looks great - how hard was it to put together something like that as a small team?

We have a pretty good idea of where we are strong as a team and where we are weak so we designed War World in such a way that we maximized our strengths and mimimized our disadvantages. For example, we realized that it would take less effort to build 3 mechs and a lot of weapons customizing the mechs than it would have taken to build 8 mechs with unique weapons. It then turned out that it actually made it a better game as well so that was a nice bonus. Other than that, in some ways it was easier than working with a big team because communication is so much better. Instead of trying to keep 20 people up-to-date you only need to talk to one or two people. It makes things a lot easier and decisions can be made within minutes.

2)When it comes to 3D work, what packages do you prefer, and why?

Johnni (the War World artist) used to work with Maya but we decided to switch to 3D Studio MAX because of cost and availability issues. Nowadays (because of Maya price drops etc.) it probably doesn't make that much of a difference which one you choose.

3)In multi-player War World performs better than most FPSes - how did you manage that?

War World employes a new multiplayer technology that (as far as we know) hasn't been used in any other multiplayer game before. It basically eliminates a lot of the issues you normally have with online games. For example, in War World you don't have to aim ahead of the other player to compensate for lag. During development we regularly tested War World with a simulated ping of 1 second and the game was still smooth and playable.

4)With the coming of the next generation of consoles, some developers have said that increased production costs may cause them problems or lead to price rises - is this true, and what does this mean for indie developers?

What is interesting about the games market is that there isn't just one big market. There are a lot of different markets - some of them are huge (like "1st Person Military Shooters") and others are very very small ("Text Adventure Games"). If you want to compete in the huge markets then you need huge teams and bugets because that is what the competition is throwing in as well. If you compete in some of the middle size markets then you can't use huge teams because you simply won't make money. For example, let's say you decide to compete in a 50k market. That is a market that no publisher will ever enter because it is too small for them. But a 50k market is HUGE for a small team. So I think that the more the budgets increase in the bigger markets, the more opportunities indie developers will have in the smaller markets.

5)What skills are most important in the industry these days? If you were looking to be entering three or four years from now, what would be the most important thing to learn?

Depends on what you want to do. If you want to code then learn C++ and start making your own small games. If you want to be an artist then get your hands on a 3D modelling application (some are free on the internet) and learn how to do game style models. If you want to design games then read as much as you can about game design, try and design games on paper, get as much info about how to write a design doc, try and break a popular games into its individual parts and find out why it works etc. And if you want to do music for games then get access to a MIDI system and learn as much as you can. It is with games as with everything else. The more you do it the better you get as long as you constantly look for ways to improve your skills and keep your eyes open.