SpatialOS is helping Spilt Milk compete with the MMO big boys

pcgamesinsider.biz:

Spilt Milk’s sci-fi action MMO Lazarus has come a long way from inception to its development.

Originally dreamt up as a mobile project, the title was put on the shelf while the studio worked on its most recent release, Tango Fiesta. But when the opportunity to meet with cloud server tech giants Improbable came up, and the scope of the MMO project expanded dramatically.

“Improbable was looking for a small studio to develop a small project and use its tech in the market; something that ideally would be a commercial launch and not just a tech demo,” studio founder Andrew Smith says.

“We pitched three ideas with them, one of which was 'Asteroids: The MMO'. There are a lot of games like Agar.io that demonstrate a want for these casual arcade with some multiplayer angle. It went from there. When we proved we could make Asteroids the MMO, we all sat down together and thought about what we could do with this. It felt there was a lot of potential. We looked again at Lazarus as a potential concept; the thematic stuff, the work we had done on that, not to mention the cool, and thought it was a good way to suddenly jump forward a chunk. We had a load of pre-production for free and went from there.”

Using Improbable’s SpatialOS, the scope of Lazarus has grown exponentially, with Smith saying that the tech is letting smaller teams compete with triple-A giants.

“There are three of us on the project initially - that's up to nine counting part time and contractors,” he explains.

“We're still able to make a game world that's as big and as rich as something you'd expect from a much bigger studio and compete in that space. It's a top down 2D space adventure gameplay space but we're set in space so we're not going to have verdant forests or