How long do you play a game before you decide if you like it?

An hour, two, a day? Try 15 minutes.

The first fifteen is all the time a developer gets to convince a gamer that what they're playing is worth the price of admission, or so believes NetDevil's Scott Brown.

Following in the footsteps of the masters of the MMO, Blizzard, NetDevil is breaking away from the norm of game development for their latest pet project, Jumpgate: Evolution. Instead of trying to sketch out a complete world and then going back and filling in the details, giving the game its luster and heart in a soul-killing, deadline-pushing crunch, NetDevil is crafting their space flight massively multiplayer game one gleaming section at a time.

The team, which recently topped ten people, recently wrapped up their initial goal: Building out and polishing the game's first 15 minutes of play.

It may not sound like much, but in a year's time the team had to create the user interface, settle on the look of the game, and work out the games network and artificial intelligence.

They also had to give gamers a way to create their character, ships to fly, enemies to fight and places to go.

While Jumpgate has about 15,000 serious fans, Brown says the team knows that they still have to do a much better job of convincing gamers to stick with their game.

"The original Jumpgate had less than a one percent conversion," he said.

The Evolution team had their first chance to drop the first fifteen on an audience of gamers at this year's Connect in the UK. The results, Brown says, were heartening.

"We had it set up for people to play for 30 minutes, but some people stayed and played all day," Brown said.
In a recent visit to their Louisville, Colorado studios, I got a chance to sit down with a still-in-progress version of the first fifteen, while team members sat nearby taking notes of my experience.

Logging in, I cycled through the fairly limited character choices, quickly selecting a character face and helmet design before launching into the game.

The game's intro flies me through a cloud of space wreckage while touching on the game's rather light backstory.
The game, at least what I saw of it, takes place entirely in your spaceship. I flew through and around asteroid fields, near comets, past bits of space flotsam as I searched out for space pirate's ships.

The keyboard controls were fairly straightforward that seemed to land me in-between hardcore realistic space flight and arcade space shooters.

Brown later told me that as you gain rank and cash you earn access to more complicated space rigs, ones that will include much more complicated controls. It sounds like a neat way to ease people into the mental rigors of true space flight without overwhelming gamers not used to the concept of things like drift and gravitational pull.
While my initial experience with Evolution space flight isn't quite as robust as I'd like (you can't, for instance, do a bootlegger's turn using your afterburner), they are still tweaking and I think I'd be willing to earn my way up to craft that can do some sexy maneuvering.

Targeting in on my first enemy I suddenly realize the game isn't really playing like a role-playing game anymore, I'm actually in a space dogfight.

The weapons aren't flamboyant enough for my taste, but I suspect that the higher level weapons will get quite interesting.

Shooting down enemy craft does result in loot drops, a mixture of money, weapons and minerals.
After completing my first mission, a simple one that had me gunning down a set number of pirate ships, I wing my way back to the space station, a mammoth affair that you need to fly into to dock.

Inside the space statation I find that I can upgrade quite a bit on my ship, from adding things like radar, new engines and shields, to boosting weapons or restocking missiles. I can even choose to buy more ships, if I have the cash.
A level cap prevents gamers from buying into every weapon they can afford, immediately, a bit of an annoyance, but I'd guess that has a lot to do with trying to control the learning curve. I also sell off the mineral-like commodities I collected while out in space.

I was a bit disappointed to discover I couldn't paint up the outside of my ship. Later Brown told me that was something that's come up a lot during focus tests. Something, it sounds like, they might be thinking of adding.
While I enjoyed my playtest, so much so I kept playing when it was over, I find those early missions very easy and never felt I was in danger of exploding.

Once I tried taking on a harder mission, though, I found that the danger of being blown to bits was very real.
In a still unfinished mission I took on a battle station. Once my shield was reduced to zero I didn't even have enough time to get out of range before dying.

Jumpgate looks, at least to the uninitiated, to be shaping up nicely, a game that could potentially offer a killer blend of Eve's hardcore space flight and combat delivered with a learning curve that will help attract and hook the more casual PC gamer.

Now that the first fifteen is nearing completion, the team is continuing to craft their game in baby steps: moving on to craft new maps, expanding the game's single map to five, then pushing to Alpha and eventually introducing things like an auction house, mining and, finally, more robust missions. Bucking a trend to publish first and craft later through updates, all of this will be done before the game goes live.

"We're applying the lessons learned from Auto Assault on Jumpgate: Evolution," Brown said.

As the team pushes the game to launch, piece-by-piece, we will be there, checking in on them to see how those pieces fit together and whether NetDevil will deliver the sort of game that Blizzard managed to create using the same process.