The Maw

My name is Michael Wilford and I am CEO and co-founder of Twisted Pixel Games. My role on The Maw was producer, but I also contributed code to our engine’s renderer and other parts of the game.

A little game called Doom. It gave me my first taste of game development and I made hundreds of modded levels that I shared with my friends. I was so addicted to creating levels and trying out new ideas. I easily spent more time modding and playing Doom than I have with any other game. Since then my career path always seemed clear to me.

That's a terrific question. Opportunities for indies have been on the rise for several years now, and I think the industry has already been significantly impacted by innovative indies. It's not groundbreaking to predict that indies will continue to shine in 09'. But in general, I think smaller, more agile companies that are passionate about doing quality work should view recessions as opportunities to stand out from the crowd.

Josh Bear (CCO and Director) and David Leung (Art Director) began brainstorming one day and were inspired by the excellent two-character collaboration in Ico, and wanted to make an action/adventure game with a lot of humor and personality to the characters. The leash mechanic was inspired by an old Shiny game called Wild 9. With the overall priority being personality, the concept just kind of grew from there.

Honestly, the biggest challenge was just the sheer amount of work that had to get done. We started from scratch, with no engine, no tools, nothing, and we were taking on an ambitious 3D action/adventure project. Starting on October 1, 2007, the first day of full production, we just began building our asses off. The problem was solved only by the unwavering dedication of the team. We worked mean hours. We did some art outsourcing, but Dave Leung was our only artist, so the vast majority of every model, animation, texture, shader, and visual effect you see in the game is his. When we first scheduled out his workload he was booked through 2012. Somehow he made magics happen.

Necessity, really. When the project was greenlit with Microsoft we hired the team full-time and started working. Frank Wilson, our CTO and co-founder, did a lot of research on virtually every 3rd party technology solution in existence and ultimately we ended up licensing a couple key pieces of technology like Granny 3D, which is what allowed us to cram 2 GB worth of data into 150 MB. But for the most part, we didn't have much of a budget to buy technology, so Frank built a lot of it from scratch. He's a bearded mad man.

Thankfully, nothing really serious went wrong during development. If it had, our near-impossible project would have become a truly impossible project. There was so little room for error in the budget or schedule. One thing that peripherally went wrong though is that after our game launched we decided to announce that we have been working on DLC for the past few months since the game entered certification. Apparently that was a mistake because some gamers accused us of intentionally cutting levels from the main game in order to charge extra as DLC. We thought people would be excited to hear that more content was coming, but next time we’ll keep our mouths shut until closer to the DLC’s release date.

We finally launched The Maw last week on Xbox LIVE Arcade. Development time was about 9 months.

We went after all of them! Our decision was made when one of them picked us up! David Edery at Microsoft saw the potential in our studio and in The Maw, he knew the niche it would fill in the XBLA portfolio long before the niche existed, and we worked hard to not disappoint him!

We started with nothing. So we scrambled to cobble together an engine using as much existing and proven 3rd party tech we could find. We considered every option and talked to virtually every vendor and ultimately settled on using Granny 3D as the basis for our engine. We knew that our ambitious character-driven game would have a lot of animations, and Granny’s lossless compression ratio couldn’t be beaten, especially within our indie budget. So our CTO Frank Wilson lead the charge and built a pretty amazing engine using Granny, Fork Particle, Lua, LuaBind, FX Composer, and several other cheap but powerful tools. Frank also built an editor using C# that is by far the most full-featured game editor I have ever seen. For 3D art we use 3D Studio Max, and everything came together really well.

That invention is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. The Maw started as a great little idea for a new game, but the only thing that turned it into a great game was the sweat of the team. We are very fortunate to have such an amazing team and they did a bang up job.

Probably the personality and humor in the characters. Low-budget games generally need to be innovative with witty gameplay mechanics, or simplistic art designs, or some other way. It’s hard to attempt something with high production values on an indie budget, but we knew that if we pulled it off it would set us apart. The team worked really hard at giving Maw a lot of personality, and I think they nailed it. We tried to be smart about the gameplay design and pacing and everything else, that’s why there’s no death in the game or any persistent heads-up-display (HUD) elements on-screen. But I think what people will really notice are the characters.

I would say that it’s rough making a game like this starting with nothing. It took months before we even had a level up and running. Just when we started to hit our stride and had all the tools necessary to build deeper levels, it was time to tie it off and add as much polish as possible because we were running out of time. The only reason why this project was even possible was the team. We had 7 close friends, all with an impressive gameography under their belts, who had worked together in the past, and were 120% dedicated to do whatever it takes. I wish we had a more interesting secret ingredient than that, but it comes down quality peoples.

Now that The Maw has made a nice splash for us, and given us a fantastic engine to build from, we’re looking to one-up ourselves with a much crazier idea. The dream is to keep making our own stuff, so that’s what we’re going to try and do.