3. So, where did the game come from, and what were your plans for the game originally?

Well, you might be surprised to hear that the original game was prototyped in 2001 while we were at university. It featured you trying to save someone flying into the sun who just happened to sound like Mic doing a David Bowie impression. Space games have always been our thing. I'm not sure if we're trying to re-capture the freedom of the Elite series or if our desire to be actual space-farers (we're geeks!) has affected our choice of games, but we left that game and moved onto something else.

Much later, when nothing was happening, I made a prototype of Deathwar just to see if I could give myself a sense of flying quickly through space. When I was younger I played a game called Spin... or something that featured top-down space action where you could warp which created long lines of stars. I cannot for the life of me find this game. I might have made it up, I'm not sure. Deathwar developed from this simple prototype and quickly became more. You could fly to planets and then systems. Then you could kill people and talk to people. Then you could die. But there was still something missing that made it feel like a game. An objective of sorts? We wrote in a plot (albeit cheesy) and gave you missions to complete. This later became a big bugbear for me because - in my opinion - gameplay is easily the hardest part of any game. You can make it look awesome, make lens flares and distract players with fancy graphics, but unless there's something to do, it'll end up being a simulation.

The original idea had big aspirations. We wanted the game to be from the point of view of someone making it in the universe. You were a person rather than a ship. You started on an isometric station where you could walk around, chat and ultimately get a job with a captain as an engineer, navigator, weapons specialist (or even one day have your own ship and hire people). The gameplay would entail taking orders from the captain depending on your position. Being the navigator meant flying the ship to the captain's destination. Being the engineer meant keeping the engines running well, doing engine maintenance. The weapons specialist would be in charge of shooting other ships and finally as captain you could issue all these orders to your crew. It was almost a completely different game, but we tried to do too much, came up with difficulties and re-thought it all out.

4. What changed (from the original game inception) and why?

I was the main programmer on the game. Mic did some code while he took up the role of main graphics guy. At some point I told myself that I would finish this one. From all the projects we'd written and all the prototypes we'd come up with we'd never actually finished one and released it. Again, I *promised* myself I would finish this one. Whether I liked it or not, even if it took years, I'd finish it. Making the game we wanted to make would have taken years longer than we intended. The idea wasn't really too complicated, but the coding/testing and graphics would have taken the development time into years. Little did we realise it would be years in the making anyway. We removed the main idea of being a man and created a different game. I'm not saying I don't like the new idea but it wasn't the idea we set out to build. We coded and drew.