Ferrago: Thanks for taking the time to talk with us Martyn. Firstly, tell us about the team at Staggan, and the inspiration behind the world's first massively game, United Soccer.

MH: Thanks for asking us to talk about our upcoming title, its nice to know people are interested in it. The team here at Staggan are pretty much new to the games industry, this is either their first professional programming job or, in the case of the artists, come from other industries. You won't have heard of any of our team yet, but there are a few new people lined up to start work for us in the coming months that you will have heard of, but that's all under wraps at the moment.

As for the inspiration for the game, well it's all kind of an accident. We had a new programmer approach us looking for work and wanting us to give him a chance, so we did. He mentioned network coding was something he had done a lot of, and this was something we had not yet been looking into, so I asked him to do me a network based demo. I remembered I had seen a game engine that showed lots of football players running around a field so I said I wanted to be able to have individual players control each of them. He liked the idea and within 4 days had a working demo, which amazed me. We hired him and the idea grew from there.

Ferrago: I gather the game will allow players to connect from all over the world, and compete alongside and against one another in matches. Will matches be pre-arranged or can they be played once a team is assembled?

MH: This is something we had to look long and hard at, and came up with what we feel is the right solution. There are a number of modes for the multiplayer games, private, public and Team. In the private mode a game can be set up, number of players specified, game length specified and a password. Only those players with the password can then join, so the person who set the game up only gives it to the people he / she wants playing. The public games allow anyone to join in until the maximum number of players for that game is reached. Team games count towards league points and here you can only set a game up for two specific teams and only members of those teams can join the game. We did the league games this way so that people could play their matches any time and not be stuck to a schedule. However, if in the future the viewing of big games takes off we will look at changing this.

Ferrago: Will players choose their position on the field, and will AI players be available to fill wholes in the team-sheet.

MH: The team creator will choose player positions and these can be changed any time. AI players will only be used to replace team members that have joined a game and then lose their connection. We could use them to fill empty spots in a game at the start, but this may lead to people putting out almost entirely AI controlled teams. This is something that may need tinkering with during play testing. But we'll wait for the feedback first.