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If you mean multiwinia - 2 years
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Darwinia was strongly inspired by Tron for it's visual look, and from a games point of view
we were inspired heavily by Cannon Fodder and Syndicate of course :)
[
They were copyrighted :)
[
We're still working thrings through with C4. It's by no means a guaranteed
deal, especially in the current climate. However it's a great game idea and
there are many other partners that we could work with.
[
Actually I enjoyed making Defcon the most, it was 12 months of really intensive work
from start to finish, and a great game at the end
[
We don't really work like
that. With Darwinia
we just kind of experimented for a long time, probably 18 months or so, before
we'd finalised our game design. I actually don't think you can create a
design doc up front if you want to make something genuinely original.
[
Well for the same reason
that we don't all like or listen to Britney Spears! If you're going to do
something different and you're going to make a living by doing that, it had
really better be different! I think a lot of people were thinking the same
things as us - gameplay is important and often
neglected over graphics.
[
I like all those games a
lot, but all three of them are combat shooters, military setting etc. There will ALWAYS be a place for original
games that are different from the mainstream.
[
Why/when did you decide to
sell the source code for Uplink?
IIRC, it was back in the
day when we were flat broke. At that point we figured well we might as well
sell everything we have, 'cause we haven't really got much else to looose!
[
Yes Dr Sepulveda is based
on Sir Clive Sinclair, inventor of the Spectrum and various other gadgets
[
[
Well they can be variable.
Some of these degrees are very good - others not so. The best degree advice we
could offer would be to go for the traditional comp sci
course as it'll cover nearly all the fundementals
that you need.
[
It always bothers me when
games are launched and break on day one.
Some of our games - not all - have had pretty serious launch day bugs,
and I find that frustrating.
[
But the actual guy that
appeared in game was a friend that looked fairly similar to Sir Clive and he
agreed to star in the game in exchange for a couple of pints :)
[
We spent a lot of time
working on the usability of Multiwinia, trying to
make it as accessable to new players as
possible. It's a really hard thing to
get right, and something we've focussed on heavily
since Defcon.
[
I guess it will change in
time - it will certainly change if we get much larger. We're now 10 people and
it won't take that many more to shift the feel from being a start-up / indie thing to being more serious. Not least becuase we have the responsibility of keeping roofs over
these people's heads!
[
They are very different
games. They are set in the same game
world, but they play very differently. Darwinia is story driven, arcade action. Multiwinia is more
strategic, and a lot faster to play.
Less cerebral, more visceral
[
I can tell you that i'm back on Subversion as my primary focus, and i'll be writing more about it on our blog
soon
[
Not a huge amount I'm
afraid. But it would be a departure from our current path becuase
we would have many more resources which means that it would be more graphical.
[
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The Darwinian was a
placeholder sprite, supposed to look like a basic human while we were
developing the game. After a long time
we got so used to the sprite that we decided to base the whole game around
him! The flat Darwinian has tons of
character and we've even adopted it as our company mascott
/ logo.
[
We started Introversion
with £600, which was £200 each from three founding Directors. You don't need much money at all to start an indie company - and retaining control of ourselves
since that day has been a high priority
[
We started Introversion in
£600. We were lucky though becuase Chris brought Uplink
as a finished product to the table. We spent our first money on making the CDs.
Of course things are different now with online distribution. WRT tools, I would
recommend trying some of the free tools that are available.
[
We all met at University
and founded our company in the final year
[12:25] Introversion Chris
(abandon22): jacxu (jacxu): At first I have
to say i like Multiwinia and
Darwinia a lot ...it was my fisrt
game which i bought :) music was perfect im still listening to darwinia
soundtrack do u have any connections with Tresk Will
he be ib yours upcoming games?
Tresk / Trash80 did all the
music for Darwinia and it's
really awesome stuff. He was very
generous in letting us raid his back catalog of music for use throughout the
game. I'd love to work with him again,
but his music specifically fitted Darwinia, so maybe,
maybe not.
[
I had originally planned to
launch the demo of Uplink under the name "The Intro-Version", which I
thought was an interesting play on the dominant psychological makeup of
hackers. But we ended up calling the
company Introversion Software, just because it suited who we were and evoked
the idea of cerebral games for the thinkers out there
[
It's good and bad :) Sometimes you get a big mess, nothing that
you can use. But then you get the
algorithms right, and suddenly a whole skyscraper pops into existance. It's incredible how much complexity you can
generate with proc. gen.
[
We love it, and we love
coming up with things for them to do :)
They've been a great help with beta testing, and some of our staff are
hired directly from the community. We
couldn't exist without them.
[
No reason in particular,
that's just the order they came out.
Subversion and Chronometer are both mostly single player game ideas,
although I doubt we'll make a game again that doesn't involve some
multiplayer/online elements.
[12:31] Introversion Chris
(abandon22): きにょう|Спэцтер (1specter1): I know
that you already said there won't be Uplink 2 or Uplink Online - but I will ask
it once again, maybe something has changed? Or at least are there going to be
anymore Uplink patches?
There are no plans for Uplink sequels, sorry! We like to make games, release them, then move on.
[
Yes, a combination of different efforts by Introversion
and our fans and partners has made Multiwinia into a
decent seller after all, i'm glad to say. We had a lot of trouble attracting attention
to the game initially, but we turned it around in the end. We're certainly not in any immediate danger
any more.
[
We love PC development, and it will always be our core
platform. We thrive in the freedom to do
whatever we want, and that doesn't exist on the consoles and closed
platforms. So you may see many of our
games making their way to console, but PC is where it's at for us.
[12:35] Introversion Chris (abandon22): =36ID=1LT.Kolden (mattneed):
Will it be possible for us to make and add addons to multiwinia meaning make mods and
other things like alot of people do for FPS games?
We currently have a map editor and online exchange
system in Beta, and our community are testing it. We wanted to have this ready for day one, but
didn't quite manage it. Once it's
launched you'll be able to make your own maps, play other peoples custom maps
etc.
[
I play games all the time, sometimes to the detriment of
our own projects. I freely admit that Darwinia was three months later than it should have been
because I was suffering pretty serious Anarchy Online addiction at the
time. Right now i'm loving Left4Dead and
Fallout3.
[
[12:39] Introversion Chris (abandon22): We play our games a lot during development, then
generally are so sick of them that we can't stand the sight of them for a few
months :) I like to watch Defcon games a lot.
And Multwiwinia is still a lot of fun to dip
into - probably because it's such a quick game
[
It's a tough question, but i'd
asked to be judged by the games we make, and nothing else. So we can't really be the judge of that.
[
Well several things have changed. We have had to start
thinking about how our games will perform in the market as we have a team to
sustain, but we also have more resources and experience with which to make new
games. I like to think the charm is still there, but that it's slightly
different to what it was before.
[
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It's a mixed bag.
With a Multiplayer game you can play your game much quicker, because you
can get someone else to play the opposition.
With a single player game you have to write the game AI before you can
really play your game properly. The tech
for reliable Multiplayer is however very tough, and still gives major companies
troubles even now (eg Left4Dead on launch)
[
[
We are doing Darwinia and Multiwinia for Xbox Live Arcade, but otherwise it's onto
the new projects - Subversion and Chronometer.
[12:45] Introversion Tom (introversiontom):
=36ID=1LT.Kolden (mattneed):
For those developers/programmers here in these channels tom, what would you
suggest they do to make the best out of their carreers
when it comes to Programming, and getting into game development, even if its
very basic game programming. Meaning school wise.
It depends on whether you want to be a programmer.
Almost certainly a qualifiaction in computer science
or something similar would be required, but if you're not too keen on maths, you might want to consider a role as a producer instead.
[
I just really fancied the idea of playing a game of Defcon in realtime, over an
entire day, in the background. What an
awesome and epic idea!
[
Yeah well Uplink's style suited hidden secrets very
well, since it was all about hacking and stealing and espionage. But I think we will see some easter eggs starting to appear
again in one of our upcoming games.
[
For our products, retail was starting to slow and we
were getting more and more requests from customers who were asking to download
products rather than wait for them to be shipped. We started our own digital
distribution system in 2005, and wound up on Steam shortly after that. It was a
necessary move. As for risks - we managed to mitigate many of the piracy and
rogue distrubtor risks by the adoption of a key
system.
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We don't like it. Over complicated and paranoid DRM just
penalises paying customers. We've never used
intrusive DRM and wish other people didn't either.
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We actually take a different view to most, in that
Pirate users are demo players who have yet to be convinced. We consider the inevitable pirate versions to
be extended demos. It's the only
sensible stance in the modern world where any game can be copied at will.
[12:52] Introversion Chris (abandon22): Jelco (jelcogalactaboy): Chris has
said that a lot of game developers make the mistake of promising a lot and not
fulfilling those promises, and that he wished to avoid that while writing the blog for Subversion. Despite this he's said that Subversion
is the best game Introversion will ever make. Is there a good reason for this
feat of courage (should we really be hoping for something amazing?) or are you
perhaps already regretting having said it?
I may come to regret that :) I never wanted to inflate expectations, and i've been trying not to get over enthused about it in the blog, but what can i say, it's
just amazingly cool. I promise though,
no more p.molyneux style comments from me.
[
No - it will definitely perform better than other areas
of the economy. Games are form of entertainment and represent much better value
for money than most other forms (e.g. movies / going out), so in harsh times,
more people stay and home and game sales go up. The weak Pound also makes for
more back from our overseas sales ;)
[
It's out of our hands to some extent, and down to
Microsoft, but there's still a lot of work to do yet. We think Q2 next year.
[
It's funny, we have considered that exact idea to raise
funds for our crazy games, but we'd call it Introspection software
[
[
I think it's certainly a strong factor with games like
Uplink and Defcon that they run well on older
machines and laptops. All of our games
are written in basic openGL as well, no extensions,
so you get all the effects on full regardless of your hardware.
[
It seemed a logical fit given that many people on our
own communities were Xfire users. Naturally we hope to get more people playing Multiwinia and Xfire has some good mechanisms for people
being able to share opinions about which games they're in to right now.. We're defo happy with the way
things are going so far. :)
[
We've been to
[
I think if we knew how hard it would be, i'm not sure we'd have had the guts! We were a bit young and crazy when we started
Introversion, and that might be the only way
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Technically speaking I think we've been bankrupt twice
already, or at least we've certainly run out of money altogether twice so
far. We're not doing this for big money,
and we're hits driven at the moment - we rely on each of our games doing well
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In so far as _any_ game works fully under
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Hate to say it, but generally CS better prepares
programmers for the rigours of commerical
production. We have someone from one of the game demopment
degrees and he's very good so it's certainly not that we'd never hire someone
from a game degree, but we would probably lean more towards a CS background.
[
Next year :)
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[
Four more games under the belt, each of them different
and unique from the others. And
Introversion producing two games at once - stability and ability to take risks
without worrying about eating at the end of the month
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got to be careful how I answer that - I'd like to see
Introversion with a stable foundation without having to compromise its
creativity. An IV yacht would be nice
too.
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[13:03] [Xfire]
Chatteox (chatteox): J/K!
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[13:04] [Xfire]
Chatteox (chatteox): Jelco
[13:04] [Xfire]
Chatteox (chatteox): Bug
[13:04] [Xfire]
Chatteox (chatteox): Mendes
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