Freeverse talks about the freeform space glory of Warpgate

Autumn - or Fall as our trans-Atlantic brethren will insist on calling it - is certain to be a busy time on the App Store.

One game that's already making its mark in the hype stakes - despite there not being any screenshots yet (okay, there have been some videos) - is Freeverse's space combat and trading game Warpgate.

Partly that's because there haven't been any ambitious 3D space games on the App Store yet. And partly it's because this type of open-ended experience has such a strong heritage in game history.

High time, then, to beam up programmer Mark Levin (shown above in artistic form) and find out what we should expect from its infinite starry darkness.

Mark Levin: Each member of the team brought a different inspiration to the table, but for me it was almost solely Escape Velocity.

I wanted to recapture the feeling that the events and situations you participate in or even just witness passing by are only a small subset of everything that's going on in the universe; that at any moment, the player will have a range of things to do, or places to go, or the option to take a break and watch the game systems interact with themselves.

Other team members have been inspired by Elite and other space games, as well as Fable and freeform adventure RPGs, or more formal RPGs like Fallout. We even played Dope Wars at one point.

Personally, I was able to get even more enthusiastic for Warpgate by channeling my outrage over the revelation that Ambrosia's announcement of an official Escape Velocity game for the iPhone was an April Fools joke. They think they can toy with my yearnings like that?

From the beginning we've designed Warpgate to support casual habits of playing - get in quickly, get out at a moment's notice, and make a session of even a minute or two feel like the player has advanced through the game.

We have automatic state saving which allows the player to quit at nearly any time and relaunch right back into the game without even having to select a Continue menu item.

I believe that seamless, pervasive state saving is the key to more complex games on the iPhone. This enables them to use a persistent world model and game mechanics which involve long-term rewards rather than being structured around quick, largely independent rounds as many casual games are.

I've played other games that use manual saving or even limited save points for example, and it's such awful fit for the platform that it discourages me from returning to them.

Mobile games tend not to be played in situations in which the game can realistically demand additional time and attention from the player. If the game clashes with usage patterns, it simply won't get played because getting off the subway on time automatically trumps any form of entertainment the phone can provide.

The game is open-ended enough that none of the categories are required to continue progressing through the game, but we'd like the player to try out as much as they like so each one supports and enables the others.

Success is pretty loosely defined in an exploration game like this. You can make it your goal to raise any of the statistics we give you about your progress, but we try not to tell you that you've gone far enough and may as well stop now. You always have the choice to indulge in any of them at any time: space is an open place.

Absolutely. Most of the actions you can take will affect your standings with the six major powers in space, which will then feed back into the treatment you can expect from them.

You can form an alliance strong enough that nearby spaceships will volunteer to help you in a battle, or get someone angry enough that their enemies start to like you more just because.

Multiplayer was never on the table for Warpgate; it was all about building an immersive single-player experience. You can compare scores and achievements through the Plus+ network, but a network infrastructure and player-versus-player mechanics are such a tough nut to crack and do well that we didn't want to bite off more than we can chew.

We'd be happy to return to the Warpgate universe in the future with a different game design, though. The underlying technology will continue to be refined and will be used for other multiplayer games in the future.

We expect it will take about ten hours to see and do everything the game has to offer at least once, but the game doesn't have a real end. You will never be ordered to stop playing.

The economy is dynamic and will respond to your actions, both in the local market and in other parts of the universe. Local prices will respond to excess buying and selling so settling into a habit of running the same routes isn't the most profitable thing you can do.

Your faction standing will make others cut you discounts or demand higher fees, and missions and random events will cause price fluctuations. There are a lot of things you can pay attention to that can improve your trading. And if that doesn't work out, you can always plunder convoys and sell off the loot.

It took us a long time to realise our space navigation controls and the weapon systems on the ships weren't meshing properly. It used to be possible to fight like the artificial intelligence-controlled ships do, so trading fire with complete freedom of movement, in real space along with all the planets and asteroids and uninvolved bystanders and so on.

This wasn't fun, though. It was hard to keep track of your enemies as you, them, and the camera all moved around, and exchanging fire was entirely automatic as there were no aiming controls. In this way, selecting targets and keeping track of who you were and weren't fighting was confusing.

So we had a big meeting involving virtually everyone in the company with any experience with the game, and hashed out the battle mode by taking some ideas from turn-based RPGs to give the player much more perception of the action and control over its flow and, more importantly, the ability to personally pull the trigger on their weapons.

Social networking is a big part of Warpgate. We have leaderboards and achievements to compare, and you can bring up the Plus+ menu very easily to communicate through your network.

But we also use more than Plus+. We have Facebook and Twitter integration through Postman [Freeverse's photo messaging app], which lets players easily post the status of their game and what they've discovered. There's also a lot of cosmic and sci-fi art in the game that we're letting everyone play with through these services.

We hope to add an update as soon as possible. The game's aspect of obtaining items and upgrades lends itself well to this sort of thing.

Warpgate is due out some time during fall/autumn.

Keep track of Freeverse's Twitterfeed for more news.