Mark Morris and Tom Arundel spoke at GDC this year about their success as indie game developers, especially after Darwinia snagged 3 awards at last year's IGF festival, including the coveted Seumas McNally Grand Prize. The duo opened up by tossing out some of the foam Darwinians they're so fond of carrying around in their back pockets. Luckily none of them managed to find their way back like last year, when poor Tom got clocked right in the head by some vengeful soul in the audience when the team came up to accept their Grand Prize award. I noticed they didn't toss any my way. I must not have hid my intentions as well as I thought... Mark was lucky. Oh wait I was taking photos. Drat!

Birth of Introversion

Anyways the Duo switched off and on as they took us through their early days and up to what Introversion is working on right now. It all started back in 2001, when they came up with the game Uplink, where you play as a hacker stealing research data, sabotaging other companies, laundering money, erasing evidence, framing innocent people, etc. As you completed missions you got cash to upgrade your system, but you were always being traced while performing hacks, and if you got caught you lost everything you had. There was no save game, which injected some "real world pain" as Tom put it, into the gameplay. It was definetly a game with lots of unsatisfied demand, and soon (after Tom and Mark held off drinking a while to save up some money) they were set up in Tom's parent's living room with a cd-burner hand making copies of Uplink to distribute. After several weeks they had their revenue stream. However Introversion made several mistakes despite its success with the game. When their licensee went bankrupt, they lost $50,000 - although this wasn't really their fault. They also wasted $25,000 on advertising and and $10,000 on E3. How did they waste so much money on adverts? Well when compared with how much response they got just through word of mouth alone, the click-through on the ads was rather insignificant. Viral marketing is a valuable tool for indie developers.

The Ups and Downs of Darwinia

Mark then talked about Darwinia, their second title, which wasn't always known as Darwinia. Inspired by the Indie Game Jam, the game started as Future War, and it looked nothing like Darwinia when they banged out their first major concept in 6 months. The game was fully textured and set in an outdoor environment. It wasn't until 12 months into development that the game started to look like what Darwinia is today, which is set in a digital world. However the original idea of having massive battles with lots of sprites on the screen was still alive and kicking. 19 months into development they were looking good and were happy with the game they had and anticipating its release in a month, seeing as at this point they were pretty much bankrupt with about one month of solvency remaining.

Buuuttt it didn't quite take one month. Or two. Or... three.... in fact it wasn't until the team had sold pretty much all their possessions on eBay to make it to the 31st month, when they finally had a game that was ready to ship and that they were completely satisfied with. That's all well and good, but you look back on it and realize it took three years to make, which as Mark put it is "too long when all you've got is money coming in from Uplink and you've blown it all on fast cars and booths at E3". They also made the mistake of releasing a demo as an afterthought, which they soon realized wasn't a good idea, as the demo is the first impression a player will get of your game. Although they re-did the demo properly with better coverage of the game features and introduction to the gameplay, they couldn't get it to take hold. They also initially overpriced Darwinia at $29.99, their simple line of reasoning being that, well it's twice as good as Uplink so it should cost twice as much. Mark admits that they should really have looked at other products on the market to determine their pricing. They also realized just how much they could benefit from procedural content in their games. Obviously there will be times when you have to call in an artist, but this should be something you decide very early on in development.

However it was all worth it when they won big at the IGF last year. This kicked off a slew of events for Introversion that helped catapult them into the spotlight. Darwinia received much critical acclaim (90% reviews) from many press outlets, and Mark emphasized how the press are your friends and how you have to give them what they need to do their jobs. Don't be upset if you get some bad reviews because "hey, not everyone's going to like you". The bottom line is the press can get you to your end users, so its best to take advantage of that. Darwinia also hopped on Valve's Steam distribution service, which brought the game before around 6 million users. Another key point is they had also developed a strong brand in their Darwinian characters, which they put to good use promoting their products. Finally, they managed to use all their acclaim to push the game out into the global marketplace.

The Ups and Downs of Defcon

Tom talked next about their most recent game, Defcon, which was inspired by a mix of War Games and 24. War Games, obviously, was the inspiration behind the gameplay for the game, however the popular television series 24 is what caused Introversion to wonder if they could make a game in 24 hours. Note that: 24 hours. Seven days later they had a pretty fleshed out concept that actually looked much like the final game. It should be noted that they did in fact create a simple game in 24 hours, they simply realized the potential and continued to develop it. So 7 days was a pretty quick turnaround for getting the basic gameplay up and running... of course it took nearly a year to actually figure out how to make the gameplay work properly. Tom also pointed out how much content was (or should I say, wasn't) in the game. Besides their world map they only had a handful of different sprites, and all that was really left after that was having the music composed. Yet you look at the game and you wouldn't immediately say that it's a bland-looking game or anything like that - hence the powerful use of minimal content.

So what went wrong? Well this was Introversion's first multiplayer game, and when they launched their game at 6pm GMT (which is only an hour ahead of London) their servers were inundated with requests for keys, which they didn't have yet and everything died, including their servers. They got everything back up and running but certainly learned their lesson. They also had planned for releasing on multiple systems at the same time, but they hadn't realized that networking between Mac, PC and Linux was a bit more complicated than anticipated, and couldn't launch all platforms simultaneously. Finally, they didn't anticipate the number of support requests from users they would get, mainly for lost or invalid keys and had nothing setup to handle these besides doing them manually. I've been there. Painful stuff.

And what went right? Here's an excerpt from one review:

"DEFCON is like a high quality porno film. It looks very pretty, has a gradual buildup that adds to the tension, and then there's about 15-20 minutes of non-stop action with lots of white splotches everywhere"

As you can see, Defcon won the reviewer's hearts and once again Introversion received critical acclaim (85% reviews). After their three-year stint on Darwinia the one-year development time for Defcon was very agreeable as well, although Mark was quick to point out that Defcon should have, in fact, only been developed in a day :) "always always overestimate your time" was his sage advice. They had also learned their lesson on pricing and offered up Defcon for 10 pounds as a pre-order and 15 pounds after release, netting them 30,000 sales in the first month, which was then spent hiring for developers to work on two projects at once, as well as a huge release party (I'm sure fast cars were still in there somewhere).

Introversion on the Indie Games Industry

So that's the story of Introversion and their rise to where they are now from just humble college kids who cared about games. What have they to say on the indie games industry? Mark talked about two main topics, the first of which is the fact that many publishers just don't have what it takes any more to make it worth your while to sign up with them. Back at the turn of the century (wow that sounds cool) publishers were still, for the most part, the only way to get your game to market and they knew it. They knew it so well that even though they were giving you lots of money to make your game they were still crushing developers so much (creatively, financially, etc) to the point where if the game didn't do well, there was little or no chance that the developer would ever recover from the loss. Mark described is a loan you probably don't need. In fact, as digital distribution has grown the reasons for using publishers and dealing with their squeeze tactics and 30% royalties has vastly diminished when tou realized you can go direct to market and pay simple fees for having your sales tracked and credit card transactions handled by well-known and popular services (like Paypal). So we're definetly going to see a shift in the way publishers do business with us, the developers.

The second point Mark raised was how much more accessible the console world is to indies nowadays thanks largely in part to Microsoft and the Xbox 360. With XNA indies can create console games and work with Microsoft and still receive 70% royalties on their games. Nintendo is also supposedly following this path, and while it's still a lot more work than publishing to a PC thanks to needing dev kits (or in the 360's case, a console), passing through certifications, etc - this is a broad new marketplace indies looking to start up a game studio with their buds can explore and reap potential profit.

Introversion: Looking Ahead

In closing the guys showed off some videos of one of their upcoming titles Multiwinia, where Darwinians are now doing battle against one another in a series of mini-games (like King of the Hill). In addition to being able to fight other Darwinians, they've alaso included the ability to form your Darwinians into formations to better make use of strategies like flanking other players. They also showed a tech demo of the procedural city generator they are working on for their second in-development title Subversion, set in cities and due for release in mid-2008. This was another example of their work with procedural content - in the demo the program use a 3D grid that was shaded bright green for high-density areas and darker green for low-density areas. The city generator used this to create a road network, placing more roads in areas of higher density. Next the roads were further subdivided into blocks, from which lots were created and buildings placed on the lots with taller buildings appearing in the higher-density areas. Tom was eager to point out how with the use of satellite image data it would be possible to break up the images to use to create ground textures.