GameSpy: What technology are you using to build it? Original engine or a licensed one?

Beatrice: We licensed the Empire Earth engine about two years ago, and we've transformed it quite a bit. In all the projects I've done, I've always strived to have a working version of the game as early as possible, however rudimentary the gameplay might be. It's hard to overstate what a benefit that is to the team, even before we start showing the game to people outside the studio. Though all my designers have no problem understanding and visualizing what the gameplay will be like, it's often very difficult for the entire team to grasp that when they're not part of our marathon design sessions. But if they can run the game and get a sense of what types of the things the player will do, then it's like "oh, I get it."

Since we left Sierra with nothing but the shirts on our backs, we needed to get something going fast. There really wasn't any technology out there that matched what we intended to do with our game - what we really needed was a solid foundation on which to build something new. The Empire Earth engine gave us a lot more than we had hoped for, frankly. It was and is remarkably stable, robust, and flexible and really within a couple of weeks we had something that looked good and worked really well. It resembled the game we were ultimately going to make a lot, and got us fired up. Though we've really taken the technology in a very different direction from its roots, it was certainly, without question instrumental in getting us started.