Notes from the Slippery Slope, Part 4

[Chris]

So we’ve finally announced it – our fourth game Multiwinia is coming out on Xbox LIVE Arcade and PC simultaneously, with Darwinia and Multiwinia bundled on Xbox LIVE Arcade under the name Darwinia+. Somehow I doubt this announcement took many people by surprise. For those who were paying attention it’s pretty obvious – in the last couple of years we have publicly ported the game from OpenGL to DirectX, added in support for the xbox controller, redesigned the menus to work on living room TVs instead of computer monitors, added in Multiplayer, and teamed up with Microsoft to release a Vista specific version of Darwinia. How obvious can it be?

One of our primary goals for many years has been to escape the peril of “sequential game development” – ie releasing one game at a time, once every couple of years, hoping that each game does well enough to pay the bills until the next one. Ultimately we don’t ever want to be in the situation where money is running short – because it forces us to make the choices we really don’t want to have to make. Multiwinia’s origins stem from our attempts to run two game projects at once during late 2006 and early 2007 – Microsoft had signed Darwinia for Xbox LIVE Arcade, and we were ready to go on game number five : Subversion. This seemed to be an ideal situation – porting Darwinia to Xbox LIVE Arcade was (we thought) a purely technical task, so Johnny (our Technical Director) took charge of the “Darwinia+” team and I went into fulltime Subversion development. Goodbye sequential game development, hello financial security. It took us a few months to realise this really wasn’t going to work.

Microsoft for all their faults made several big decisions when designing the Xbox LIVE service, decisions which in hindsight seem incredibly forward thinking, and as a result of those decisions the Xbox is still years ahead of the competition when it comes to it’s connectivity and online features. One of Microsoft’s requirements is that all Xbox LIVE Arcade games must include a multiplayer component, and here is where we made our fatal mistake – we designed the most minimal multiplayer implementation we thought would be acceptable. We’d made the classic mistake so many companies make – designing new gameplay purely for the purposes of cash in the bank. Our primary aim for multiplayer Darwinia was to satisfy Microsoft’s requirements enough to get Darwinia onto their service and gamer dollars into our accounts, and we set to work thinking of it as a purely technical task of grafting networking code onto Darwinia and throwing in a few interesting map layouts for players to battle over. And completely predictably, multiplayer Darwinia was a sterile and dreadfully tedious game to play for many months, before we finally plucked up the courage to admit to ourselves that we’d made a mistake.

Astute readers may have noticed an air of desperation in the blog postings around March/April 2007, as other indie creations like Little Big Planet put us completely to shame and reminded us of the kind of passion we’d discarded in pursuit of financial security. There had been no one single moment when we’d consciously decided to “sell out”, and yet here we found ourselves, knowingly producing one turd game to pay the bills and rationalising it by telling ourselves we were expanding onto Xbox and also paying for Subversion with the proceeds. It’s an incredibly slippery slope and a deeply seductive idea that one game can be made for business and can fund another more creative idea at the same time, but ultimately as a games company we make Video Games, and our success at that aim comes down to the quality of each and every one of the games we put out the door. The games absolutely must come first, regardless of the business deals we are arranging along the way, and as soon as that priority is reversed we’ve crossed the line and it’s all over for us creatively.

So we held a series of crisis meetings in London, made some hard decisions, and threw away pretty much everything we’d done for multiplayer Darwinia so far. Crucially we made the decision that multiplayer Darwinia would effectively be a brand new game for Introversion – our fourth – it would be called Multiwinia, and we would treat it with the same respect and attention that any of our other game projects received. Subversion once again took a back seat for a while and I took charge of the new Multiwinia project, acting as Creative Director over the whole project. From a gameplay point of view we went right back to the drawing board, discarding most of the work we’d done and stripping it down to the basics. Our biggest mistake had been trying to graft multiplayer onto Darwinia, which was fundamentally a single player experience. We began to think of Multiwinia as a standalone project, dropping many of the control mechanisms and rules and themes of Darwinia that previously we considered set in stone. Over several weeks we met many times in person and worked on developing a small prototype map for just two players with the most basic of rules, while Johnny focussed on providing a working multiplayer system over the internet. Once we had this multiplayer system it enabled us to do daily playtests on our single map, sometimes several times a day, slowly changing and adding new ideas and features until finally there was no doubt in our minds : it was fucking great fun to play.

And this is how we solved the problem of Multiwinia, and avoided the fate of releasing a game we knew internally wasn’t good. Would we have committed to Multiwinia as our fourth game if it hadn’t been for Microsoft? Probably not, but this is the situation we found ourselves in through our own design, and ultimately we had to follow through. During the remainder of 2007 we gradually added more and more maps, building up slowly through three player and then eventually four player when we felt we had a handle on things, and after that we started to expand into different game modes and styles. And something strange happened - once we had the foundations of a good game in place, there was a period of around four months when we were bursting with new ideas, and every day something new and fantastic appeared in game. We were jamming, exploring game design instinctively and following our creative whims into often dark and hilarious places. We were back on track.

Multiwinia eventually made it out of the woods late in 2007 and I began to step away, withdrawing to a safer distance where I could concentrate on Subversion once again and give higher level help to Multiwinia when it was required. We’ve definitely learnt a lesson along the way, although I’m not 100% sure I can get it down accurately in words. But it’s something like this: The creation of a game can’t be rushed, it can’t be faked or passed off, it can’t be excused for business purposes, and it can’t be done in half measures – you either do it at full speed with all guns blazing, or you accept and live with the low quality of your game and the certain knowledge it was your own fault as a consequence.

[Rkiver]

If only certain other game companies could learn from that Chris.

It's nice to see the inner workings of Introversion via these blogs. It shows an honesty with the community (and world at large) that is lacking from other game developments. Your having to step back from Subversion to dive back into Multiwinia for example shows that you want every game to have the best it can, even so much as acknowledging that you started to think of money over the games, but then realising that doesn't work for you, or for Introversion.

I love reading these blogs, and seeing more and more of Introversion. Keep up the hard work, don't need to say good, as I know it will be.

[Ace Rimmer]

Hurrrumph!

Also, I completely agree with Rkiver. It is refreshingly nice to see the inner workings of IV and the "dedication" to great games. To get caught up in the monetary game is to show that you are in fact, human.

[martin]

Indeed, I love getting this window into IV.

And of course, for about a year now I've been running out of reasons to hate microsoft... this is another reason not to

[shinygerbil]

Indeed, I find it very difficult to fault XBLA - apart from the price, it's awesome ;D

[zach]

I still can't shake the thought that playing Multiwinia with a controller must be terrible. I'm growing old


It's incredibly nice to hear that not everyone is perfect. As a video game company, I have been looking up to Introversion Software ever since I played Uplink. I was kind of terrified when - yes, it could be felt - I started feeling that IV were somehow, in some weird way, selling out.

Not directly, mind you, but as Chris said himself, they didn't really notice any specific point in time where they could be said to have sold out,

[...] yet here we found ourselves, knowingly producing one turd game to pay the bills and rationalising it by telling ourselves we were expanding onto Xbox and also paying for Subversion with the proceeds. [...]

This blog post of things to come, and reasons of things long past - relieves me.


I've never lost faith in you, Introversion, but a little part of me died when I felt that you were on the road towards becoming just like the next indie game company.

That part of me now lives again, more happily than ever.

[ynbniar]

A very candid blog from Chris. I found this bit interesting...

There had been no one single moment when we’d consciously decided to “sell out”, and yet here we found ourselves, knowingly producing one turd game to pay the bills and rationalising it by telling ourselves we were expanding onto Xbox and also paying for Subversion with the proceeds. It’s an incredibly slippery slope and a deeply seductive idea that one game can be made for business and can fund another more creative idea at the same time, but ultimately as a games company we make Video Games, and our success at that aim comes down to the quality of each and every one of the games we put out the door.

I'm just wondering if it's completely black and white, if there is NEVER a scenario where creativity can be compromised on one project to guarantee delivery of another? I suppose it depends on who you are but I wonder if there is some parallel with the movie business. Gary Oldman for example has taken on some very dodgy parts but used the money from those parts to get his excellent Nil by Mouth made...I seem to remember an interview with him where he said he did the silly things to pay for the things he wanted to do.

[RabidZombie]

Indeed, I find it very difficult to fault XBLA - apart from the price, it's awesome ;D

The only XBLA gripe I have is despite all the required testing, blindingly obvious bugs, problems and mistakes make it into the wild. Mr. Driller is a fine example of how no testing at all is evident.

[freeammo]

I've been following Introversion for a number of years (having admittedly more than a casual interest being a friend of Chris during VI form days many hundreds of years ago); and always find this blog fascinating. Admittedly the majority of the ideas mentioned during the Subversion development are either significantly beyond me intellectually or alternatively I can't really associate with them, but this message really hit home with me.

I work in R&D for a large multinational company which shall remain nameless. Like I'm sure many companies of its size it has its principles which it tries to follow during times of plenty (the customer is always right, save the planet etc etc). And for a few years whilst I worked there I geniunely thought that this was the way the company worked. Some decisions were made which were not always necessarily the most profitable but which did provide some lasting benefit to suppliers, the environment etc. Crucially though, the company as a whole was doing very well and as such these decisions did not affect the bottom line.

Recently the combination of the credit crunch and the rocketing raw material prices have forced us to make some significant cost-cutting moves. With these moves you find yourself basically conning the customer or the end user. They have taken a hidden performance drop or a hidden price increase whilst still beguiled by the marketing spin put on the product. It's only then that it's truly brought home that you are in fact a money making machine - not a person but a resource. All in the name of hitting the bottom line. Yet if you look at it from a company point of view - it still brings home the profits. What's wrong with that? Need I answer...

Ultimately though it's the harder option that will prevail, which to their lasting credit Introversion have taken. Vacuum cleaners - you could have cost-saved a bag cleaner for years and years until it basically became a fan on a stick - but the true step change in the market came when Dyson came along with the bagless cleaner. Now it's almost impossible to find a decent bagged vaccum cleaner. It's a great pleasure following Introversion and Chris' post has given me real hope for the future.

[briceman2]

But it’s something like this: The creation of a game can’t be rushed, it can’t be faked or passed off, it can’t be excused for business purposes, and it can’t be done in half measures – you either do it at full speed with all guns blazing, or you accept and live with the low quality of your game and the certain knowledge it was your own fault as a consequence.

You Sir are an artist! Long live art in games!

.

[ewanm]

Good people usually spot their own mistakes, now don't forget that the Linux and Mac users like OpenGL release .

[Pox]

Good people usually spot their own mistakes, now don't forget that the Linux and Mac users like OpenGL release .

*nods*

[vanarbulax]

While I don't think this is the case for Multiwinia and I agree with the sentiment of always giving the consumer a nice, polished product I also feel there a limits to how much time and effort one should put into anything especially if it's something your not interested in/just fulfilling a requirement when resources can be devoted elsewhere. If it's not worth doing it's not worth doing well.

[_xavieran]

The XBox...ouch...

OpenGL is much better than DirectX anyway...

So...thou hast cleaveth to the dark side...

[zach]

While I don't really disagree with you on any points, _xavieran - rather the opposite - your post does seem a bit fanboyish to me (not saying that 'fanboyism' is necessarily a bad thing).

Mainly, it lacks arguments - ie., a description why xbox is not desired, and furthermore, what makes OpenGL better than DirectX.

A general elaboration on why you feel what you do, and perhaps why others ought to feel the same in your opinion - if so.

Also, considering that Introversion has always catered to Linux-(and to some extent, Mac-)users, I think it will be a while before OpenGL is not used for introversion games. It is that much more portable than DirectX, after all.