Wonderland Software's Matthew Wiggins

We've all had a similar entry to the industry - loving playing games since an early age and then gradually learning how to code and create our own programs. Al Harding and I have known each other since we were at junior school, where we used to draw game ideas on graph paper and dream about being able to turn them into something real. During university, Al ended up taking a year out to work for Intelligent Games on a Dune real-time strategy for Westwood and EA - I ended up joining him there for a short while as a level designer.

I then moved onto Lionhead as a programmer, with Al following along a year or so later. I was working on Black & White 2, whilst he ended up working on Fable. Whilst there, we met Mark Rose, who was working for Big Blue Box on Fable. Over the intervening six years at Lionhead we worked on various projects with each other.

Mark and I left Lionhead, separately, at the end of 2007. Mark moved onto Codemasters Guildford, whereas I had a long-term plan to create my own start-up company, but wanted to get experience at somewhere other than Lionhead first. At the time, Lionhead had been through the Microsoft acquisition and was settling into the development of Fable II and Milo & Kate; and I was being offered very different roles elsewhere – I chose to spend time working on Second Life for Linden Lab, which was a big learning experience – so it felt like the right time to reignite the fire by trying something new. I eventually ended up moving back to the Guildford games scene, joining the Codemasters Guildford studio as a lead, where I hooked up with Mark again. Al was still at Lionhead at this time, and we eventually decided to make the move to split away from our roles at those companies to form Wonderland.

The main change is that the teams have got much, much larger. This is due to the quality requirements shooting up over the last ten years or so.

The benefits are mainly around the quality and complexity of game features and art - you need really big teams to produce enough high-quality assets to fill a world such as Fable's, for instance. This causes other team size knock-ons, such as needing much large tools teams to deal with all the assets and as the teams get larger they need more support and production roles to manage them.

Unfortunately, you do lose a number of things with increased team size. Creativity is reduced, as the projects cost so much that generally teams are more risk averse. The teams also become much more hierarchical, a requirement of keeping 100+ people teams organised - this means that individuals have a much smaller contribution to the overall project than on a smaller team, and that there is an awkward split between decision making and implementation. If you're senior enough to have authority to make significant decisions, you tend to not be at a level where you actually get to implement them. This leads to communication problems and a risk that the final game just doesn't have the tight integration of design and implementation that you can have on a small project.

We were initially attracted to the iPhone because of the form factor and interface - multitouch is a fascinating input mechanism, with lots of potential but also lots of pitfalls. So, it's a great challenge to work on.

But the App Store is very attractive for a start-up such as ours, even with extremely high number of apps available. It provides potentially millions of customers to us, all with a strong feeling of security in the way the App Store works, so there's no fragmentation of users across different portals and payment mechanisms as there is on the PC. And as a digital distribution platform, we have much closer and more rapid relationship with the customer than we would get via retail.

The development environment is also extremely good, with great support, tools and documentation making it a pleasure to work on. It's really important for developers to feel super happy about the platform they are working on, to get really good results at the other end.

Without a format such as the iPhone it wouldn't be possible to create a start-up in the way we have. There is very little barrier to entry, particularly compared to the standard console brands - just getting approval to work on the PS3, 360 or Wii as a professional developer can be extremely arduous. It also gives us a massive market within which to prove ourselves - so there are many upsides.

There really aren't any new pitfalls - just the same ones that face any business: we have to differentiate ourselves in the market; find ways to connect to our customers and publicise our products; develop products that people want; and find revenue models that match our expenditure on the games.

We see ourselves as an Apple platform developer - iPhone, iPod touch and iPad are our outlets. I believe it's critical for the games, the team and the company to have sharp focus in order to be successful and by currently solely aiming for those platforms we can do that. This is especially true because of the radically different interfaces these devices have - if we were to dilute our expertise onto other platforms that don't support similar interaction mechanisms, then we'd struggle to make such strong experiences.

Every platform has particular strengths and weaknesses, so I don't see the iPhone/iPad as being any more difficult to develop for than any other. In fact, it's much more exciting because of the potential for experiences that a more standard platform, such as the 360, can't offer.