Hermitworks Entertainment Blogs

At the risk of tooting my own horn, and by association the horn of everyone working on Space Trader, I feel that the upcoming content that we’ll be sharing with players is shaping up nicely. Today I had the in-house testers run through the latest revision of Free Trade, and the response was favorable. We’ve taken a lot of the feedback we got from the Space Trader beta regarding what people like and don’t like and have implemented them in the Free Trade challenge. Expect more things that you enjoy, and fewer things that annoy.

One of the advantages of being a small developer is that feedback regarding game changes is extremely fast. It’s made even quicker for us with our kickin’ rad delivery mechanism for the game. We can upload a new version of the game to our site, and instantly everyone is updated to the very latest version and all their feedback applies to our most recent work. Another advantage to online delivery is that we can instantly patch holes and push out new content.

Other games after their initial launch have continued to pump out excellent content, but the vast majority of them have been a seperate patch or download that users had to get on their own. This meant that the userbase was fragmented for awhile during the transition phase. Some titles have mitigated this problem, for example Jagex Ltd’s Runescape is similar to Space Trader in that you play in the browser and therefore grab the latest patches and content immediately after release. In contrast with Space Trader, Runescape is an extension of the older style Java and Flash games. It’s bound by the limitations and overhead of Java in exchange for its ability to keep all users current.

Neverwinter Nights is a retail game that kept content pumping out after release, both for free and for pay. New adventure modules full of quests and things to do were released at a decent pace, but users had to acquire them on their own for the most part. Space Trader is similar in that we’ll be providing new premium content after the game has launched to keep people coming back, but we’ll be delivering it automatically without having to download 200 meg patches or content packs every few months. It’ll be a constant stream of new challenges and levels that you seamlessly gain access to the moment we update our servers.

I’m sure that there are other games handling content distribution in a way that we are, and we’ll see more applications of it in the future. I’m positive that HermitWorks will be involved with that new direction for online games - But for the time being, it’s nice being on the forefront of the ease-of-use wars.

Regards, Daigle.

Postscript

I’ve been using my Mac at work lately, and I really have no idea how I ever lived without Exposé and Dashboard. Or dual cores.