Sharky Extreme: What's it like working with team members all over the world working in a “virtual office”? Do you intend to bring the team together into one location sometime, have everyone under one office roof?

Zileas: There are several benefits and detriments to it. The benefits are that people can work at their own hours, and we also don't have to commute to work, which I daresay is a relief for everyone. But the problems (which we get around) are that you need very devoted and self-motivating people, otherwise things don't get done. We had to be very careful when choosing team members that everyone could work on their own time and still manage to get things done. Another problem is that you need to pay special attention to coordinating efforts since, for instance, you can't just walk up to someone and ask them something. But you can email them or instant message them, which has turned out to be almost as good. We don't suffer as many distractions (strangely enough) because people don't come up to us with questions. Typically, leads (especially lead programmers) get a lot of miscellaneous questions in a normal development environment, try as management might to prevent this. This cuts down on productivity a lot, since you get distracted and lose your train of thought. After this title, we will most likely go under one office roof, though some jobs do not require full time on-site presence. But the virtual corporation model actually does work very well, and has consistently done fine for us.

Sharky Extreme: Will the game offer AI opponents?

Zileas: Right now we don't plan on having fully fledged AI opponents because if we did that we'd just as well do single player. No doubt lots of people will say "But I need to practice to learn the game to play against other people!" We, of course, have anticipated this and have a plan to make this a non-issue. Basically, in our opinion, single player is not adequate or even useful preparation for multiplayer except in that it teaches you what the units do. Other than that, it really doesn't teach you very many strategies that are applicable to multiplayer, and probably teaches you more bad habits than good ones. In order to supply training and such, we will be including many tutorials and game videos, which illustrate basic multiplayer tactics and such. They will have commentary and marking up that'll make things extra clear.

We will possibly develop a game opponent AI eventually, though it would not be with the initial release, but rather, with a single player version or as an extra in a patch. The tutorials can also be made by anyone. Basically, you can record a game you play, then insert comments, graphics and other stuff as needed in order to make it more interesting. It's sort of like a Quake demo, except with more information. We can put in some basic build orders and mark up the important points and why things are being done. I'm actually a somewhat experienced strategy guide writer, so that will most likely be something I'll be grabbing the horns of soon enough.