It’s an interesting time for me at Introversion right now. In the past I’ve always worked exclusively on the next Introversion game, fulltime, at the expense of pretty much everything else. This time around I’m trying to do two games at once – which may turn out to be a terrible disaster of an idea. The two games are of course Subversion and Multiwinia, both of which are in development at Introversion. Multiwinia will probably be the first game released of those two, and I’m trying to take more of a Creative Director role on this project. What this means is that I spend more time thinking about the game and playing it, and thinking about what should be done next. The other fulltime members of the team, Gary and Johnny, do most of the heavy lifting in terms of coding and implementation. This has been working very well for several months now, and our regular playtests of Multiwinia frequently descend into hilarious stickmen beach landings and calamity on a vast scale. It also means I spend 2 or 3 hours on the phone most days, but I’m willing to accept that.
I spend the rest of my time developing Subversion, which at this stage is still extremely experimental. I’m not going to say much more about it right now, but I’m happy to show some screenshots of the latest version of the city generator. You can see that the scale of the generator has changed a great deal now, with each city block being divided up into allotments and each of those allotments getting their own buildings. Still absolutely loads to do, still no clear idea where it’s going to go next. But extremely exciting stuff, kind of a dream project for me.
Now and then I just need to stop and pinch myself. Three games down and two more in development - we’re actually building a fairly respectable back-catalog now. We had a film crew in our office last Friday, filming our board meeting and our test games of Multiwinia on the big projector, complete with smackdown talk and foul language. Defcon is currently on sale in shops across all of Europe and North America. Our ninth full-time staff member is starting work this week on _another_ new project. Johnny is the first team member to hit 30 years old, but the rest of us aren’t far behind. Myself, Mark and Vic fly to Seattle next week to meet some seriously important people. My girlfriend recently moved jobs and the new company she joined is actually younger than Introversion Software.
Things are moving fast, but it feels right this time around, and I’m sure we’re on the right track.
