My name is Flavien Brebion, 32. I’m French and live in Brussels, Belgium. I am an aspiring game developer, although I currently have a full-time job in a side industry (virtual reality using game techniques).

I’ve been programming games since my childhood. I started around the age of 11 on an Amstrad CPC, then later on an Atari ST, and then moved to the PC. I created various games, including a humorous point & click adventure game, an isometric single-player RPG, and even a sim-city “colonization” game. Most of those games were abandoned but still reached the “alpha” stage and were somewhat playable, although not complete. The main reason for that was mainly shift of interests (from myself or from the people I worked with).

My main and only project at the moment is Infinity – The Quest for Earth. To simplify, this is a space-sim, sandbox MMO, a bit like Eve Online, but twitch-based (no point & click, you directly control your ship). It is directly inspired from the old franchise Elite/Frontier, and one of the main “selling” points, like Elite, is its realistic universe with seamless planetary landings and a massive procedural universe.

Yes and no. When I started to hunt for a job, I decided to specialize myself in one area, graphics programming, as it was one of my main interests. Although I’m not as specialized in the other domains, I have decent-to-excellent knowledge of all critical game programming areas, including networking, databases, physics, game systems, interfaces, etc.

Through research & experimentation. I keep my skills current by researching works from other programmers, watch conferences or reports from other companies online, like the GDC or SIGGRAPH reports. I also spend quite a bit of time experimenting with new techniques myself, or discussing ideas with friends. Also, I frequently watch over advanced topics on game programming sites, such as our very own gamedev.net’s, even if I don’t post as much as I would like to.

I wouldn’t say the very latest, but I upgrade my computer regularly, normally every two years. I’m currently on an Intel Q6600, Vista, 3 GB of RAM and a Radeon HD 4890, however I will change it next year. I can’t wait to get one of those SSDs, hopefully it will drastically reduce my compilation times, especially with a large code base such as mine (nearing half a million lines of code in C++).

My previous project before Infinity was a sci-fi high-speed hovercraft racing game, codenamed “Lightspeed”. It also reached the “alpha” stage of development. One track was playable but the project died due to a lack of content and teammates going off to university (hence having no more time to dedicate to the project). I think it was pretty much at that time that I started to fully realize that relying upon others wasn’t a good idea, especially when they’re not getting paid. Meanwhile, I was working on an experimental procedural planet renderer, and decided that for my next project, I would try to do something that requires as little content as possible (ironically, I’ve never had as much content as I do now for Infinity), which screamed “procedural space game”. I also consciously avoided any type of game that required complex animations, such as characters. Not for programming reasons, but for content reasons (finding good animators is even more difficult than finding good modellers or texture artists).

At the very beginning, it just started out as an experiment. As it grew in complexity, I soon realized it was a perfect candidate for a sci-fi space sim. So for all but a few months, it has always been my intention to make a game from the code.

It’s hard to give an exact date, because while I started early (around 2004 if I remember well), I didn’t concentrate on it until it became my main focus of interest, which occurred around the end of 2005. So, more or less 5 years now. As I already have a full-time job, Infinity is developed part-time, so it goes relatively slowly (when compared to funded projects with a dedicated team).

Programming-wise, it’s still pretty much a one-man effort. A few other people have volunteered to make independent prototypes though (for example, there’s a pretty complex economy prototype that has been in the works for a year). For the rest, there’s a team of 5 other dedicated developers responsible for content development (artwork, sounds, writing). Design is more or less collective.

Finally, there’s also a contribution system. Interested parties are free to submit 3D models, textures, sounds & music . Many have become quite involved and very skilled, bordering on professional quality level. So we’ve received a pretty insane amount of contributions from hundreds of people, and even if only a fraction of those will eventually get into the final game, that’s still more content that I would have dreamed of at the beginning.

Since the core team is quite small, the work is naturally split depending on each developers competences. We all work remotely. Day-to-day communication happens through IRC and forums. Assets management is done via FTP or the website/wiki. I think the biggest issue is communication, and getting people from different time zones to stay in contact, especially when they get busy IRL for various personal reasons.

The idea simply came from looking at Elite: Frontier, and thinking, “How did they achieve such an amazing technology (a realistic universe with seamless planetary landings) on two floppy disks, 15 years ago” ? That’s how I started to investigate procedural techniques and terrain generation/rendering.

The algorithm itself is pretty straightforward, although the details require a lot of attention. It’s based on a quadtree subdivision, similar to geo-mipmapping (although at the time I wrote it, I had no idea what geo-mipmapping was). One of the key differences is that it deforms a spherical surface instead of a flat plane. It’s pretty much like a cube morphed into a sphere, then displaced by a heightmap. Of course, the real difficulty is the 1001 little problems that appear when you want a realistic seamless planet. Such as, handling of gaps between terrain patches, handling lighting, generating heightmaps, normal maps and textures procedurally, keeping a high-resolution precision to have a real-sized planet, etc.

Fairly important, but not to the point of not having to look good, artistically. Immersion is probably the most important factor. For example, Spore uses a similar technology, but the planets feel tiny/cartoonish, almost like toys. In Infinity, I wanted to have real-sized planets, that the players can explore for hours, if they so desire. The sense of scale is something that very few games have successfully achieved, and I think Infinity will be particularly impressive in that area.

No, Newtonian physics is restricted to ships and human entities. However the universe is based on modern astronomy/astrophysics knowledge, using Kepler’s stable orbits. Statistics are used to control the proportion of procedural bodies appearing in the galaxy. You will be able to find gas giants, multiple-stars systems, rings/belts of asteroids/dust, icy/barren/volcanic planets, and of course Gaian (Earth-like) planets. They’re based on real theories, so you will not find a Gaian planet outside its star’s habitable zone for example. All these bodies move in real-time, so it’s possible to attend a sunset over the mountains on an alien world.

True. I read astronomy/physics magazines regularly every month for the past 6 years. When implementing new space features I take at least a few hours to re-read old magazines, search on the web for statistics/pictures to give me a good understanding of what they are and how they should look. However, I’m not stubborn so if something doesn’t go as planned, or if we discover in beta that it just doesn’t work/isn’t interesting, I have no problem adapting to make it more interesting and fun to play. Realism and immersion, yes, but not at all costs. One typical example are Gaian planets. They’ll probably be more frequent in-game than in reality, because they’re also the most interesting type of planets that players can explore and interact with.

As you can imagine, working with a single type of unit doesn’t work. I use a hierarchical system of units. At the galactic level, light-year (LY) units are utilized. At the star system level, the kilometer is the base unit, and coordinates are represented by double-precision floating point numbers. At render time, vertices are generated as single-precision floats, but translated into camera space to minimize the loss of precision due to large numbers.

Pretty much from the beginning, after I wrote the first prototype of the seamless procedural planetary engine. A procedural sandbox universe is a very interesting challenge design-wise, and a perfect setting for a sci-fi MMO, so it was a natural choice.

A bit of both, actually. The shard design is similar to Eve Online’s, but due to latency reasons (the game is twitch based, not point & click), there will likely be at least 3 shards, in Europe, USA and Asia. For financial and practical reasons we’ll probably launch the game with a single server (Europe) and expand as needed.

Scalability and complexity of development (with various server nodes sending messages to each other, asynchronously). The server isn’t finished yet, but so far I’d say scalability is and will remain the major concern. For example, the server has to perform collision detection since the client cannot be trusted in an MMO. It’s pretty complex, since our ships have different hit zones (each thruster, each weapon, and even different hull sections). When balancing weapons, you have to take into account not only the type of weapon, the damage it does and its other effects, but also how much it will stress the server due to a high firing rate. Keeping the amount of SQL requests low and caching the data is also a concern.

Yes. It’s based on UDP, with a reliable layer for messages that need it. I use a few other external libraries like curl for HTTP requests or downloading patches.

There will be no more updates of the ICP, since maintaining it would require work that is better invested in getting the actual game out as soon as possible. The primary goal of the ICP was to test the network model, the Newtonian physics/controls, and get a feel of what the combat would be like. A secondary objective was to release something to the community to keep it motivated while waiting for the development cycle to culminate to launch. To show that there is light at the end of the tunnel, and that Infinity is not just another vapourware project.

I’m using many third-party libraries. OpenGL/DirectX for rendering, OpenIL for loading images, OpenAL for sounds, ODE for physics, TinyXML for XML files, squish for DXT compression, Curl to download files/access the web, ZLib for ZIP compression, and probably a few others that I forgot to mention.

Yes, it has been the plan all along. Unfortunately, it requires the engine to mature, especially in the domain of documentation and tools, and I prefer to spend my time on Infinity development to get an alpha out as soon as possible. But it will be done, eventually.

Moving on the game design for a game such as Infinity, how did you go about creating a story for what is essentially a huge area of play?

Is there a single story covering everything, or are you relying on many smaller story threads interweaving?

Will there be any factions people can join or play as?

The scale of the game must pose some interesting challenges – how do you go about making it fun for players?

What will players eventually be able to do in the game?

It could be possible for players to fly around forever and not bump into another soul – do you have any plans to help bring people together and make them hang around together?

On the flipside, what incentives will you be providing for people to explore your rich universe and all its wonders?

Do you think that the social side of the game will be important to people? What ways are you providing people to interact with each other?

How will you go about implementing the travel between stars and planets in the MMO environment? Games such as Elite allowed you to physically speed up time in the game – this obviously won’t be possible in an MMO when everyone is on the same timeline...

You have a large and active community, how key are they to the direction that Infinity has taken and will continue to take in the future?

How are you going about financing the development of Infinity? Do you have any external investment?

How are you going about marketing the game so far? It’s already got a buzz behind it after being featured in publications such as PC Gamer and so on – was this intentional or has it just ‘happened’?

Do you have any indications of how you’ll monetise the game after release? (Subscriptions, free-to-play, etc?)

Are you interested in any of the latest ideas emerging from the digital space, such as microtransactions and other clever ways to monetise a game?

Any news on when we can start expecting alpha/beta tests? And a final release?

You’ve been involved with Infinity for a long time now – what ways do you use to unwind and relax from what looks like a hugely intense project?

Finally, do you have any tips you’d like to offer people wanting to make their own games based on all your experiences so far?