Written by Caelum
Interviewing the JKG Team
Today, I interviewed the JKG team for JKHub. Jedi Knight Galaxies is a highly anticipated mod that's been in development for four years, and promises to release all kinds of neat new content, including guns. Lots of guns.
Hey guys. Thanks for agreeing to do this interview; awesome to see you all here.
Silverfang: Thanks for having us
dvg94: Hi
You are the developers of JKGalaxies; could you briefly introduce yourselves and tell me what it is you do?
Suibuku: Well, my name is Suibuku, I'm the 2D artist. I'm 16 and I've been on the team for several years.
Pande: I'm Pande, from Canada, the lead mapper and currently the only mapper. I am 18 years old as of today, actually. I've been in the team for about 2 and a half years.
eezstreet: Hello there, I'm eezstreet, current lead programmer of Jedi Knight Galaxies, I'm from Florida.
dvg94: I am dvg94, (kinda)retired mapper, 17 years old currently working on project that was supposed to be a very small mod
Sato: I'm Sato, I live in Portland, Oregon, America. I'm a writer (and ignore what the others say; I don't make bloody maps). And I've been in the team for around one and a half years.
Reven: I'm Reven from Latvia, i'm 18 years old and i am a weapons, items, creature, player modeler a concept artist and maybe soon texture artist. I have been in the team for about 2 and half years perhaps.
Silverfang: I'm Silverfang, I started out as a writer but I consider myself more of a 3d artist, but I'm also the general PR Manager. I'm a born and raised Coloradan, but also an American, and I love Gaming, Metal, dubstep, and star wars! (who knew? )
BlasTech: I'm BlasTech, a Swedish veteran from 2009 on the team. I was appointed project director after my predecessor Jake some time ago, feels like ages actually... I'm the jack of all trades around here, dealing with modeling (mostly guns it seems), texturing, some easier script handling like menus and weapons, and then we have my trump card... The effects. And as a response to Silverfang here, I'm also a metalhead. More into progressive than the other metalheads here, but everyone have their own tastes.
JKGalaxies has been in development for roughly four years now, and we've seen a lot of promises to release really cool stuff. Could you briefly explain what JKG is and why everyone should check it out?
dvg94: It's basically all you ever wanted from a star wars game, it's fun, it's pretty and most of all, george lucas didn't have anything to do with it.
eezstreet: Jedi Knight Galaxies was a project that started in..2008 or some time like that, with huge ambitions: to recreate Star Wars Galaxies in Jedi Academy. With time, we changed a few of our design decisions from the base of Star Wars Galaxies and made it into more of an FPS with mechanics similar to Jedi Academy.
Pande: JKG started with the desire to create a challenging but original mix of FPS gameplay with a sandbox and RPG style universe as experienced in Star Wars Galaxies. In it's earliest days, it began on Lugormod, with the idea of purposely creating maps and some minimal code and creating the internal aspects using Lugormod. It then grew to making it all with original coding and larger maps, and trying to push the limits where ever possible. Now, we're finding it hard to scale up in many aspects of the mod, especially content creation, and so we have switched to a Phase style release. Our first phase, JKG: Versus, essentially uses what content we have completed so far and adds in a few new features that the team intends to use later in Phase 2, 3, and beyond. The idea is to build up our player base and especially grow our awareness in other modding communities, and hopefully pull in some more horsepower for getting the rest of the content done.
BlasTech: JKG is quite possibly the most ambitious mod ever created for the Jedi Knight series, where we aim to bring back the feeling of old, while updating gameplay and graphics to a more modern standard as well. And it has grown and changed over the years, to become the true Star Wars gunplay game that will be our initial release.
Reven: Jedi knight galaxies has been inspired by many games like kotor, republic commando and many more.
Silverfang: To put it simply, our mod kicks ass!
eezstreet: Hah, yeah, that's true. Our mod does kick some ass.
I'm most excited for the rpg elements of this mod. which doesn't mean i wont try the phrase 1 release.
While I too am most looking forward to the RPG elements, I definitely won't be missing out on the phase 1 release haha.
Anyway, great interview - Just finished reading it on JKHub. I really liked how the interview was for the team rather than just the team leader(s) =)
Please don't improve the graphicst to be modern! My computer is comeplete **** and the the highest game it could run is jedi academy!