Recent Blogs
How to Intern at a Game Development Studio
By the Concept Art Team | June 17, 2008
Being an intern in the gaming industry isn’t what many people think. There aren’t any coffee runs or dry cleaning (except on Thursdays). It feels much more like being a student at a workshop, or perhaps an apprentice.
Iconic Character Development
By the Design Team | April 9, 2008
In developing character classes for Blackstar, we decided to handle them in an iconic fashion. To the design team, this means conceptualizing the entire class as an individual, a single character that embodies the core philosophy, attitude, and visual design of the class. This way, the class comes to life in ways that a generic approach cannot. Our initial development effort is spent creating a compelling and interesting representative of that class, a compelling personality, rather than just a simple role.
Meet omicron-Walker
Introduction to Infrastructure Systems
By the Design Team | April 2, 2008
Roleplaying games share a common set of game systems: character classes, skills, abilities, items, zones, monsters, NPCs, quests … the systems that define player characters and the world around them. If you’re building a game that you plan to kick out the door and never touch again, you can get away with developing content for those systems with hard-to-maintain scripts. But if you’re building a game that you want to sustain as a service, the initial system design takes more forethought.
Concept’s role in grayworlding (Part 3 of 4)
By the Concept Art Team | March 10, 2008
As mentioned in previous blogs, rapid game prototyping allows for flexibility and quick iteration in order to create the most exciting experience for the player.
Production Art’s role in grayworlding (Part 2 of 4)
By the Production Art Team | March 8, 2008
“Games today are large and complex.” It seems that we could start every one of our Dev Blogs with this opening and still not make a dent in the challenges faced in making a “Next Gen MMO” - but maybe we can scratch the surface and show how we’ve adapted and evolved our development processes.
Design’s role in grayworlding (Part 1 of 4)
By the Design Team | March 7, 2008
Getting Started
We believe that top-tier MMO games (like our project “Blackstar”) need to have awesome player-versus-player gameplay to achieve a rich and fulfilling overall experience. So, from the very beginning we set out to ensure that we would have a strong PVP foundation and that we would be play-testing (and adjusting) PVP as soon as it was possible for us to do so. Fortunately, the end result of these efforts saw us making meaningful changes to our PVP rules, player abilities, weapons, area scale, movement rates and overall game balance … on a daily basis.
Spacetime Studios is at GDC!
By the Directors | February 18, 2008
The Spacetime team is at the Game Developers Conference 2008. We have a busy week of meetings with publishers and developers as we look to build new relationships and create new opportunities for the company.
We put up 20 seconds of video showing what the team is capable of, so check it out! We’ll be showing a lot more behind closed doors at GDC.
Requirements Gathering
By the Programming Team | January 24, 2008
As software engineers, we would all like it if requirements never changed. We want to be told up front exactly what features the software must support and then we can build and deliver it.
Unfortunately, requirements change—always. This is a fact of life. More importantly, if the requirements don’t change, you have a real problem. No designer (sorry guys) can know up front exactly what it takes to make a game fun. It is a process of exploration. So instead of being frustrated by change we need to take responsibility to work with the designers to make sure we have the best possible requirements.
Read the rest! »
Revealing “Blackstar”
By the Directors | January 16, 2008
Over the next few days we will reveal the characters, environments, creatures, and stories that define our unique science-fantasy MMO project “Blackstar.” For now, we leave you with this image and a few brief bullet points as a teaser!
Fly your spaceship to exotic locations, blasting through cunning enemies and dreadful space creatures.
Leave your ship and take up the quest, exploring mysterious planets, derelict space stations, and force your way onto enemy ships.
Live as one of four races, ranging from heroic humans and beautiful aliens to warrior robots and undead horrors in an epic science-fantasy universe where advanced technology clashes with ancient demonic power.
A New Beginning
By the Directors | January 7, 2008
We know it’s not the norm but at Spacetime Studios we’ve always been about communicating when we can. For two years this has been in good times but we want to put out a message to the community before the rumors start.
Our project has been cancelled by the current publisher. Regardless of how you look at it, we won’t be entering production in the immediate future, so we are retrenching and unfortunately had to let 12 folks go. There are always wild rumors at a time like this so we wanted to be as specific as possible to the number and circumstance. All 12 employees released were given extended benefits, severance and will be supplied letters of recommendation. These were good folks and we are not happy about it. We’ll do anything we can to help them land somewhere else. If you are a developer and are looking for good folks, drop us a line at jobs@spacetimestudios.com.
The cancelled game was our primary project and we have a complete MMO engine w/ networking infrastructure, tools suite, and next-gen rendering engine. The company remains extremely committed to the IP and once all mutual obligations have been completed between the publisher and ourselves we intend to explore every possible avenue to see that our team’s collective vision come to fruition.
We want to stress that there are no bad feelings with NCSoft. There is a tremendous amount of mutual respect between our companies. They have conducted themselves with honor and integrity, and we would work with them again in an instant.
We are still here, stable and strong, and running a little bit lighter while we figure out our next move. What does not kill us makes us stronger said the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. That may be true, but it isn’t pleasant. Wish us luck and good fortune.