On Thursday night, the developers from Jumpgate Evolution stopped by to talk about their game in our most recent Developer Chat. Today, we present this article summarizing some of the interesting aspects of the chat.

As readers may or may not be aware, Jumpgate Evolution is a follow-up to NetDevil’s original Jumpgate, so it wasn’t a huge surprise when some of the questions revolved around the previous game. Perhaps the most interesting question to start with got right to the point in asking what the major differences would be between Jumpgate Classic and Jumpgate Evolution. Istvan answered that the biggest difference was going to be the look of the game, the “huge graphical update”. He also pointed out that the intention is for Evolution to be a “more modern game overall”, addressing some of the systems that are incomplete in the original version of the game.

Questions about the nature of the game and its relationship to its predecessor went from the more general questions above to much more specific questions about how this new game will function. There were questions about everything from braking in space to piracy. The answers to these questions made it quite clear to the participants and to readers here today that while Evolution is going to follow in the footsteps of the original, that it will be a kind of re-imagining. Here, for example, is how Awen answered the question about pirates:

“Pirates [are] something that we’d really like to do but chances are that it will function differently as this is an entirely separate game from the Classic. We’ll be interested to see what the players are going to suggest in this area.”

Read the article here.

"the biggest difference was going to be the look of the game, the “huge graphical update”. He also pointed out that the intention is for Evolution to be a “more modern game overall”, addressing some of the systems that are incomplete in the original version of the game."

The unfortunate part about that particular question is that the real answer should be a fairly long essay.  Not something you can dash off during a rapid-fire dev chat.    I hope to have an opportunity to address this in greater detail, possibly on the official website once it is launched, and on fansite forums such as here.

lol dust it off. Thats great!

didn't know their team was so small. that will be interesting to see how that works out. delay in game, delay in bug fixes, etc.

I, for one, am looking forward to this game. I enjoyed the first one immensely and joystick MMOs are...well....are there any others, excepting the flight sims? Personal skill-based MMOs are a rarity out there, but it's a trend I'd like see reversed. Best of luck to the NetDevil team. (Oh, and PLEASE make a better chat interface than the first Jumpgate, that was a total pain )

We agree the JGC chat system was sorely lacking.  No worries - many better chat systems have been built since 2001 that we can, will, and intend to draw upon.