We stayed in an incredible 12th century Franciscan Monastery called Sant’ Antonio, which comfortably fits 12 visitors into 6 bedrooms, has two kitchens, a couple of living rooms and one roaring fire place, around which we all gathered most evenings for extensive wine drinking and discussion. All very civilised, and a genuinely wonderful place to escape to.
As I said earlier (and I bet nobody believes me now), this was not a holiday, but was in fact the second Introversion training week, the first being our trip to Heidelberg, Germany in August last year. There are several objectives for these training weeks, but primarily they exist to tackle the difficult problems that face our company (and most companies) and are never dealt with head on during ordinary business hours. Classic examples would be the inevitable disagreements and misunderstandings and grudges that build up between team members over the years, and are never dealt with because it’s just too damn awkward and touchy-feely. I also believe many people at many companies think there is no place for feelings and emotion within business, ignoring the fundamental fact that ALL business is built on personal relationships between individuals.
We also spent much of the latter half of the week looking to the future – something which we used to be very good at. We are all in agreement that we’ve been way too reactive in the past couple of years and not nearly pro-active enough – opportunities like Darwinia+, Multiwinia and Chronometer (and others) have come up and been dealt with appropriately, but we haven’t been driving those processes – they are opportunities that came to us, rather than us seeking them out under some higher goal. That’s not a strong position for a company to be in, and we have taken the first steps towards changing that for the next year. The upshot is that I feel more positive about the future direction of Introversion than I have for quite a long time now, and I think the other Directors (and our crew) would agree on that. The point is that it’s very difficult to look ahead as a company, because everyone is always so bogged down in their day-to-day tasks that the higher aims are never given serious consideration, with the result that a company bounces from one job to another until it eventually loses its way completely. We never quite went that far, but a key objective of Italy was to tackle this issue by taking the entire team out of the office and out of the country, and to give us the space to discuss the future openly.
The only non-Introversion participant was the event co-ordinator Isabel Howells, or Izzy. Her background is in management and team training, and Mark met her on an MoD training course in Namibia of all places. Mark was so impressed with the skills she was able to teach that he talked the Directors and Vic into the Heidelberg trip last year with her, and this time around we decided we’d repeat the process and take the entire team along. She’s a unique combination of teacher, coach, facilitator, psychologist and counsellor. I’m going to try and get her to write a blog for this site about her experiences of working with Team Introversion, because I think that would bring a really unique perspective.
So 2008 is coming to an end, and it’s been a terrifyingly busy year for me. In the past twelve months we’ve scaled up to ten fulltime employees, and we’ve worked insanely hard to get Multiwinia finished and launched. Myself, Mark and Chris Hastings spent three months locked in a room together working on pre-production from Chronometer, resulting in a document that is literally three inches thick. We’ve moved offices. The Xbox port of Darwinia and Multiwinia (Darwinia+) has been consuming our team since Multiwinia’s launch, and our office is now bursting with Xbox dev kits and controllers. Subversion has been going on in what little spare time I’ve had. And there is still one other project we haven’t announced yet that took up even more of our time – hopefully we’ll be able to talk about that early next year.
Contrary to our previous three games, Multiwinia didn’t make the world’s gamers and journalists fall to their knees in worship in front of us, which was and still is an extremely humbling lesson in our own failings that we have now learnt the hard way. In the past I think we’ve operated with a certain feeling of arrogant invincibility, and Multiwinia showed us how dangerous that can be. We’ve watched as other smaller and newer Indie companies did it better all year long. So a big part of Italy for us was figuring out what we’re good at, and trying to decipher what makes an Introversion game an Introversion game.
It’s been a long time since I’ve written about Subversion on this blog, and for that I am sorry. The truth is that I’m slightly embarrassed right now, because I haven’t made nearly as much progress as I was hoping in the last six months. So my new years resolution is to make Subversion my top priority once again (this must be the fifth time now) and to start writing about it regularly once again, even though it’s going to be disappointing for everyone when you see how little things have moved on. The good news is that we have a plan for Subversion now that includes actual dates and things, and starts to involve other members of the team early next year, and I’m confident I can see the final game in my head. I’ve spent long enough experimenting, and it’s now time to make an actual game with the results. It’s time to share it with others and make it into something real.
Have a great Xmas.
