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The Around the World in 80 Games spotlight series is all about visiting Xbox LIVE Indie Game developers across the globe. In this month’s installment, we visit with Andrew Brazier of GLPeas to learn about making Xbox LIVE Indie Games in the United Kingdom!
Where are you and your team from?
We're from Derby, in the East Midlands, England.
What languages do you speak?
English and Bulgarian.
How popular are video games and video game development in England?
Huge! The UK has a proud heritage of game development right back to the early days, and gaming is a popular pastime amongst people of all ages.
What are some challenges that you faced that are unique to the UK?
It’s still tough for indie developers to start out in this country, but Xbox LIVE Indie Games and similar platforms have made things much easier than they were 10 years ago. Online distribution has opened up a whole new way of releasing original content to the world at minimal, or even zero, cost.
Could you describe Carcophony and BlindGiRl for anyone who hasn’t seen or played them yet?
Carcophony is basically a puzzle/strategy game, where you control the flow of traffic by changing the traffic lights. It sounds simple, and it is really simple, but the more you play it, you will begin to discover a whole different layer of complexity.
Carcophony becomes a lot more about strategy and planning. I think the core gameplay mechanic has similarities with Tetris and even chess, because you’re always needing to think a few moves ahead. There’s also versus and co-operative multiplayer mode, and a global highscore system so you can compete with your friends.
We had various goals for Carcophony, which was our first indie game. These goals included testing the development platform, taking a project successfully from start through to finish in a controlled timeframe, and learning from the problems encountered along the way.
In regards the game itself, our philosophy is to not bother remaking something that someone else did before. There are plenty of people doing that. We wanted to focus on games that do away with unnecessary gloss, stripping it back to the bare gameplay essentials. That’s not to say the games don’t have high production values, because they do, but we prefer to spend our time building good gameplay rather than creating fancy animations or 3D models.
Our second game, BlindGiRl, also followed these principles. It’s a game about discovery and exploration, but also introduced some innovative gameplay features such as the wave propagation system which BlindGiRl uses to ‘see’ her way around the mazes. We’ve had some great reviews and feedback for BlindGiRl, people have enjoyed the open-ended gameplay and the way the game is stripped back to a very simple mechanic which develops into a challenging and thought-provoking experience.
Can you tell us more about the other games you’ve worked on?
We’ve several years of experience in the games industry, working on big ‘AAA’ projects for large publishers. Whilst working for a big developer is great, indie development has allowed us to work on something completely of our own design, which is quite refreshing. It allows us to risk a few ‘love or hate’ gameplay mechanics, and see what people think of them.
What games are you playing now?
Red Dead Redemption, Toy Soldiers, Picross 3D, Alan Wake, and we’re still playing Braid and Portal.
What made you want to use XNA Game Studio to make your game?
XNA Game Studio offers an effective and clean API which allows developers to get things off the ground very quickly. For instance, we had our first working prototype of Carcophony running within a few hours of the initial idea.
The concept of self-publishing is also very appealing, allowing direct access to a major online console market.
What other tools/programs do you use to help you make your games?
For gameplay we tend to engineer our own tools in .NET. It is really easy and effective. For sound editing, we use Audacity and Cubase LE4, and for graphics GIMP and Adobe Photoshop.
How long did it take you to make your games?
For Carcophony it was 10 months, working on it for around 10 hours a week. The game was up and running very quickly, the rest of the time was spent adding the detail, balancing the gameplay, and trying to resist the urge to keep adding features!
BlindGiRl was a smaller title, and took about eight weeks in all.
Can you walk us through a usual day?
We have full-time day jobs, so indie game development is something we do purely during our spare time. We primarily work from a big "TO DO" list, working systematically through it and adding in the functionality we can, whilst still being ruthless about feature creep. When working on your own projects the temptation is to add everything in that you can think of, but you have to remember that you’ve got to release the thing one day!
Do you have any ideas, wishes, hopes, and/or dreams for anything XNA Creators Club could do or provide to be even better?
We’d love to see a YouTube-style interface for browsing games. Download and try one out, and then you are automatically shown other games that might interest you.
Contentwise, we’d like to see more original and risk-taking games. That’s what indie games are about for us, trying new ideas.
We’d like to see leaderboards. We think they add a lot of value to an Xbox LIVE Indie Game product. We’d even offer some exchange of revenue for such a feature as we realize there are expenses to be met for serving such data.
More stats on downloads and purchases would be helpful, to better inform business decisions.
Finally, some kind of filter for originality would be good too, so you can more easily try out products that are attempting new things.
What’s next for you?
Carcophony was a fairly detailed project with lots of features such as multiplayer, etc.
BlindGiRl was a smaller game, built around a simple core mechanic. Through developing both of those games we’ve learned a lot about indie development, and have had some awesome feedback from gamers and the press.
We are currently working through a few tentative ideas for our next game at the moment. Whatever we end up going with, you can be assured that it will seek to explore some new avenues of gameplay and be something you won’t have seen before.
Are you ready to check out Carcophony and BlindGiRl? Head on over to the Xbox Indie Games Channel on your Xbox 360 or visit the Xbox Indie Games Marketplace on Xbox.com now!
Feeling ready to make your own game? Our Education Roadmap is a great place to start!
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