Innovative Indie Collective Develops the IPhone Game… Steam Pilot

John from Escape Factory talks about their game, Steam Pilot

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/escape-factory-gdc-2010-interview.mp3

Or listen to it here…

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

John: Sure. I’m John Lysick. I’m one of a number of people involved in Escape Factory. We’re an indie collective based in Melbourne focusing currently on iPhone games. We’ll probably move into iPad shortly and probably also into Android.

Interviewer: What game are you working on now?

John: Our current focus is called Steam Pilot. It’s that little Victorian spy game we used to play.

Interviewer: So, there will be a video accompanying this audio interview with the actual demo.

John: Yeah. I’ll send you a video if you don’t have it. So, it’s basically a little casual game, a typical iPhone game with just a bit of a time.

Interviewer: I don’t know if it’s typical because in this game you’re actually kind of controlling a pseudo balloon. Is that normal? I haven’t seen that on others before.

John: No, no. That was one of the motivations from it, from the creative directions. As I said, we love Victorian Steam Pilot by itself, but additionally I was particularly interested in making something that was about speed or time but it wasn’t actually about space. So, it’s a slow, unwieldly, ungainly craft that you’re trying to manage and wrestle with gravity against you and a nasty bird. And there will be some future old-schools like chimney sweeps poking with their brooms.

Interviewer: It kind of reminds me of Mary Poppins to an extent. I don’t know if that’s it.

John: Yeah. It’s a European esthetic. There’s something there that we wanted to touch on and capture. And, as you said, that’s not something we’ve seen in the iPhone market.

Interviewer: I guess, what inspired that? Aside from your interest in that theme, what inspired just using the balloon and then how did you come up with the mechanic? And how did you tweak it, and what were some of the challenges as you were coming up with this design?

John: As I said, we wanted to make something that was slow but about speed. So, it was kind of an interesting thing. The physics were interesting. It’s been built in Unity. Now, as I said, I’m not the coder. I’m the animator-designer. So, there was a fair bit of tweaking with the gravity treatments and so forth. It’s not a real gravity–it’s not a real anything. It’s quite tweaked. But it was kind of interesting trying to manage and wrestle the speed at which things dropped, for example, and the degrees of heat added into the balloon in order to make it go up and down. Within Unity that’s relatively easy to tweak. Admittedly, that needs a bit more tweaking.

Interviewer: There are kind of like three controls. You have your little lever. You have the steam button, and you have the pickup button. Do you think that that was too many buttons for a casual audience?

John: I don’t know. That’s a good point. As I said, it’s a prototype and we’re looking for that kind of feedback. That’s something that we may…

Interviewer: Have you been play testing it on random people as you’re developing it?

John: Certainly, with people I’ve met here. In the development process it’s primarily the team and a few casual users in the periphery. And there’s some certain things we pick up. You pick up some things pretty quickly. Some of those we’ve acted on. Some of them we said, “OK, we’ll deal with that later.” Size of buttons is one thing we want to revisit.

And also people have mentioned the possibility of, maybe, a bit more control actually making it a bit more dynamic so it reaches down and grabs and so forth. These things are all up for debate now, and we’ve got that general tone and theme and style and some of the mechanics. We just need to refine those and then probably in the three or four months we’ll be in a position to release the first episode.

Interviewer: What were some of the other challenges you’ve encountered? Are you developing another game in addition to this, or do you just focus on one game at a time? How do you run this collective?

John: It’s a good point. It’s a bunch of us doing multiple things. So, in this case primarily myself and my brother–I’ve got lots of brothers–and we basically do the design and animation. We team in this case with a coder and a musician.

We’ve also got a couple of other games in prototype form. So, that’s the one we’re kind of pursuing and there’s a couple of others. So, we’re basically developing four games at the same time. Three of the others are kind of in a position–they’re even more casual and some are just throwaway fun. And they’re almost ready to go immediately.

It is a bit of a wrestle with managing people’s time and also, for instance, the coder has been working on another game, a game called Mole which is a digging game and with another studio, Capri Studios. It’s all a bit difficult, and we’re just doing it for love not money. But in our case we were thankfully supported by the government in Melbourne and Victoria so that’s been quite handy.

Interviewer: Do you guys meet every day then, or how does that work?

John: We have kind of serious production phases, I guess we’d say. It’s probably every four to six weeks of serious production where we either meet or we’re in constant communication, just by messaging or e-mail or the phone. There’s a typical reality to deal with like that. No, it’s not so much face-to-face. It’s more just communication.

Interviewer: Do you guys then see yourself developing for the iPhone more, or what platforms are you guys going to focus on? Are you going to focus on new game genres?

John: Well, I guess we will be developing for mobile with Flashlight and Flash previously. With Flashlight it really took off. It was a little bit of problem with the energies put into there, but it didn’t really amount to anything. So the App Store and the iPhone presented the opportunity to explore and we did that. We put out the first game just funded it ourselves, just got it all done. We tested the water, proved that we could do it. Realized we could, then we’re now focusing on that. And now with Unity expanding, it’s delivering platforms to Android and obviously the iPod, the iPad. They’re different markets we’re interested in.

Interviewer: Since you’ve developed for Flash and Unity and all these other technologies, where do you feel mobile game development is going?

John: OK. That’s a million dollar question. It would be good to know. I don’t know but all I can say is that working for a set platform with quite defined specifications, like screen sizes and resolution is an absolute God send to be working with hand sets with numerous dimensions. I don’t know where it’s going to go. I’m happy to find that Apple has got this large market at the moment. That’s certainly where we’re focused, but we’re a small collective and each of us is used to changing, as I said, with changing technologies. We’re happy to swing by whatever is going, what is feasible.

Interviewer: Are you looking at other genres of games? Like, there’s these augmented reality games that are popping up. There’s kind of the mobile MMO. Are those things that you’re interested in, or are you more interested in the quick play experience on these?

John: No, initially quick play is certainly the first thing that came on. We’re quite the serious game as well and exploring some of these. Like, for instance, a few of us at HK also teach and we’re quite interested in supplementing some of the cool things that we creative in the mobile content. And we’re writing courses at the moment which utilize the hand-held device as a mechanism for either delivery of work or collection of work, so photographing content and utilizing it to add to the work that you do in the school.

Interviewer: Can you talk about that more or that’ll come out later?

John: Yeah. We’ve also got some thoughts about relaxation type games and office or professional kind of brainstorming technique kind of games. Certainly, I’ve been interested in other genres. In the first instance, I guess it’s easy and the level of depth of these games and focusing these casual games are relatively achievable and those things we’re certainly interested in exploring. I guess we’ll be doing that in the next 12 months. I’m not sure where they will exist, whether they’ll be like an App Store type marketing method, and that’s not a bad thing because the marketing would be the App Store as such [?].

Interviewer: Any suggestions then for other indie game developers who want to do iPhone games or work in a collective or something else like that? What would have been the top learning lesson?

John: Good point. I’m not sure. I don’t know. All I can say is one of the things we’re trying to do is touch [?] as I said before. We’re trying to create distribution mechanisms as well. So, rather than our games just being stand alone objects, we’re incorporating a tweak to list the highest score, global leader boards. Try to get a bit of cross pollination of promotion between games so when someone checks their leader board it would be a promotion for other games. Really, you’ve got to take–I think I’ve come to terms with it–you’ve got to take the market on your shoulders and don’t let it roll off to do that. I guess that’s the biggest lesson I would say…

Interviewer: Is there a website where folks can just visit and learn more about the collective?

John: Escapefactory.com.

Interviewer: How do you spell that?

John: Well, it’s described as the Escape Factory, but it’s E-S-C factory.com.

Interviewer: OK. Thank you very much.

John: Welcome.