that he "[doesn't] think the actual simulation is as deep as Sim City ... All sorts of interesting factors were incorporated there. Instead, we've gone for the fun aspect." The option to automate trading was added due to Ing and Crack's belief that Utopia's trading and resource management aspect 'won't appeal to everybody'. Utopia's alien environments were partially inspired by science fiction novels. Each alien race has differing AI routines, but the level of detail put into their development was limited by memory restrictions, with Ing expressing that "It's a trade-off really. You can't go completely overboard because the more intelligence you put in, the slower the gameplay. You've got to balance the two." A user-friendly UI was an important aspect in Utopia's development, and Ing expresses that "Nothing annoys me more than a product which is graphically good but in which it's difficult for the player to grasp the controls. That's why from the word go I'm always thinking about making everything as easy as possible to use." Utopia's graphics were created in DPaint. Expansion disks for Utopia were being considered by Gremlin prior to Utopia's release, due to the project 'seeming promising'. Ing states that he holds a design philosophy of making lists to organize a game's design prior to its development, stating that "First we generated a massive spec. It's about 100 pages long and details absolutely everything that needs to be done. Then what I always do is make a list of every single piece of code that needs to be written to make that spec. possible and work my way slowly though the list. Eventually it gets shorter." A fully functional map screen was prioritized as the first part of Utopia to be programmed, and Ing states that "We created some temporary graphics for the buildings and then I worked on all the routines necessary to scroll around the world and select those buildings." At this stage in development, Utopia lacked an isometric perspective, and the map screen was instead in 2D graphics. Ing expresses in regards to this design change that "Halfway through what was going to be a 2D sim we decided it would look a lot better with an extra dimension." Ing expresses that the transition from 2D to 3D midway through development was a complication, stating that "There were a lot of problems when we switched to 2D to 3D. For