Small developers really can create giant games. There was proof of that at the Game Developers Conference at the booth of Improbable, a United Kingdom startup that enables small companies to create huge simulations.
Herman Narula, CEO of Improbable, told me in an interview that the company has launched its open beta for SpatialOS, an operating system and computation platform that allows developers of all sizes to create games that can tap the power of the cloud — or Internet-connected data centers.
The SpatialOS open beta kicked off on March 2, and it coincided with the integration of the Unreal Engine into the platform, allowing Unreal developers to join Unity creators to take full advantage of SpatialOS’s development tools. Improbable has also partnered with Google Cloud, which allows developers access to SpatialOS and the Google Cloud servers at significantly reduced (or in some cases free) costs.
So far, developers working on SpatialOS-based games include Worlds Adrift, the upcoming game from Bossa Studios; Chronicles of Elyria by Soulbound Studios, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game built with the Unreal engine; Seed by Klang, a game of planetary settlement set in a shared, persistent world, created by a team including former senior CCP (Eve Online) employees; Lazarus by Spilt Milk Studios, a multiplayer top-down 2D shooter set in a huge galaxy populated by artificially intelligent alien factions locked in a war for territory; and Vanishing Stars: Colony Wars by Ninpo Game Studio, a new type of massively multiplayer real-time strategy game, played across thousands of star systems, each with their own planets to battle on.
Here’s an edited transcript of my conversation with Narula.
Image Credit: Dean Takahashi
GamesBeat: You have a booth this year.
Herman Narula: Yeah! It’s gotten bigger. It’s growing.
GamesBeat: Are you an extension of Google?
Narula: No, no. But we’re side by side, which is good. The partnership’s been great. I don’t know if you’ve seen the games that have been announced in the last couple of days, all on the partnership, but these five developers all have working prototypes. Some of them have launched on Spatial. We’re excited by how fast things are moving. It’s validated our thesis that if we can get the stack out there as a platform, developers will be able to build bigger games quicker.
GamesBeat: So, everyone’s taking advantage of the Google Cloud offer?
Narula: Oh, yes. They just use SpatialOS, but we can run on different devices.
GamesBeat: What have you announced here?
Narula: Games like Seed, by Klang, which is a massive MMO ringworld around an entire planet. The players stay there when you log off, and they have NPC behavior that’s really cool. They showed a cool playable of that. There’s Ninpo producing an RTS game about planetary colonization. There’s Lazarus talking about their newest build, which has 3,000 concurrents or something like that that they can support at once. There’s also Jeromy Walsh talking about Chronicles of Elyria, which is a more traditional fantasy of MMO, but done at scale and done beautifully well. I think they have 150,000 people already in their forums, waiting for the game to launch.
We’ve had several thousand developers sign up since we went live a few weeks ago. They’re all playing with the deck right now. There are probably more games we haven’t even figured out are on the platform yet. We keep getting people walking up to us saying, “We’re making a game on Spatial! Why don’t we know about you?”
We launched Unreal integration two hours ago, so now, SpatialOS works with the Unreal engine. It makes us work with almost everyone now. We’ve also gone into beta, so now the deck is stable enough to start launching games. Worlds Adrift is of course live right now…