Interviews// Interview: Jonas Møller: Lost Empire: Immortals

SPOnG: Anything you can say about your next project?

Jonas Møller: Not really, sorry... It's a strategy game.


SPOnG: Obviously, with the larger races there's a lot of work gone into them and a lot of backstory. What about the smaller races?

Jonas Møller: Each of the races has a short back-story which you can ask them about. Then they have different power levels, so the races you meet first are not so strong and you get some initial conflict, but then there are also some more powerful minor races, that are further from the starting place. They have more systems, better systems and bigger, better ships. And each race has some sciences that you can trade with them.


SPOnG: How does travel work?

Jonas Møller: I'll show you (gestures to the screen). It's a little different to other turn-based games. So, here I have a scout. So, you say 'OK, I want to go over here,' and you can assign a waypoint. It has a distance it can travel - it depends on the speed. So, you give out all your orders, and in turn they'll execute them.

All the other players plan at the same time as you. So you press enter and all the other fleets in the galaxy move and they encounter each other and the battles will be calculated. All the battles will be calculated and you can go into battleview and see who fought and who won and you can see each battle and see what really happened.

There are these orders for fleets, which determine their behaviour.


SPOnG: You've got a really nice overview. How do you deal with that? Because obviously space is 3D... Does everything move on a single plane?

Jonas Møller: Yeah, because it's really difficult to perceive depth, because you don't have any terrain or anything. This system (gestures to screen) could be a system that's far out, but down, and it's difficult to see that from the side, so we found it was just too difficult to manoeuvre (in 3D) and it didn't really give anything – maybe it looks slightly better. So, we kept it on a plane. And the real galaxy's pretty thin!


SPOnG: Any plans for other formats?

Jonas Møller: No, it's programmed in C Shell. So... that's basically Microsoft technology, and it's allowed us to develop the game a lot faster than if we had used other tools. But we can still get great graphics, because we still have access to DirectX10. We could theoretically put it on Xbox with XNA, but we don't have any plans for that. It's not impossible to port to Linux, for example. It can run C Shell, but I'm not sure how easy it would be.


SPOnG: Thank you for your time!