Interview: the nuts and bolts of online iPhone and iPad strategy game Empire of the Eclipse, part 2

In the first part of our interview with Lee Dotson of Zarksoft, developer of the upcoming online strategy game Empire of the Eclipse, he elaborated on gameplay mechanics and features.

The challenges of crafting a strategy game on iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad is the focus of this second part.

With a team of game designers whose collective experience spans numerous well-known PC franchises including Diablo 3, Star Trek Online, and Hellgate: London, Lee explains that Empire of the Eclipse will bring a true online experience on par with these greats.

The strategy genre on iOS is pretty poorly represented in my opinion. There are a few games out there that have been decent ports of PC or console titles, but it's clear that they weren't originally intended for iOS both in terms of design and performance. Tiny buttons, cluttered menus, and usually clunky map scrolling or units that just disappear the moment you zoom out at all are all too common.

In terms of multiplayer, many games don't offer it, but when they do your choices are limited to turn-based multiplayer games that seem to drag on forever or dealing with web based "MMOs" that offer little to no interactivity or strategic depth and that charge you a fortune to remain competitive.

As for advancing the genre, I wouldn't say we're doing anything revolutionary. I'd just say that we've been taking our time to address the issues we currently see with the genre on iOS. We've looked at games like Civilization and games like Master of Orion and asked ourselves how would these games have been made if they were designed to both be large-scale multiplayer and on iOS from the ground up?

How do we give players a depth of options to work with without bogging them down in endless minutiae? How do we get all of that depth onto such a tiny screen and still have it be intuitive and accessible? These are the questions that I don't think we've really seen answered on iOS, and so I think that's what we're bringing to the genre.

Having worked on several large-scale multiplayer games, we know all too well what an undertaking they can be and it's definitely an area that many developers have tried and failed in. Being so familiar with these problems has given us the needed experience to take the long view in designing all of our systems.

We've been building the infrastructure for Empire of the Eclipse for roughly two years now, and our team has been working with online games and related systems since the days when 2400 baud modems roamed the earth. So not only have we taken the time to do this right, but working within tight technology constraints is something we're very used to.

In terms of large-scale game balance, if there's anything we've learned over the years it's that the players will always approach the game in ways you never expected. We've implemented a detailed tracking system so we can play back any game to help us sort out how best to address any unexpected anomalies.

One of our main goals with the Empire of the Eclipse has been to keep everything accessible in just a few touches. To this end, there are buttons for all the major areas of the game located at the top of the screen so you can jump to your fleets, planets, mail, or diplomacy settings in a single touch.

From each of those menus you can jump to the physical location of any of those planets or fleets in just one more touch. Since all 1500 players could potentially crowd all their fleets into a single sector we automatically place individual ships, fleets, and orbitals (space stations and the like) into specific locations around whatever they're orbiting so you can easily assess your own forces against anyone else who might be in the same area.

So far we've seen some attempts at doing MMOs on iPhone, but it still usually means only a handful of players in a level at one time. With Empire of the Eclipse there's room for everyone on the server to be in the same place.