Entering the Atmosphir

I did an initial sketch when I was flying out for that first meeting, trying to think about what type of game we'd make. For me, I've always loved creativity, so it came to me that while I've always wanted to make a videogame, I don't know how to programme, or make 3D art. So it was a bit of a selfish thing - I'd look at a game like Zelda and wish I could make something like that, that I had the ability to create a story, characters, dungeons that are along those lines.

Starting to think about that, and an upbringing of playing lots of Lego with my brother, I got to thinking: "What if I could build things with Lego, but then add time limits, and enemies, and power-ups, and all these different things?"

It was just a concept at first, but Martin was extremely excited about it, because it was different and new. In October 2006 LittleBigPlanet hadn't yet been announced.

We're in the early stages of thinking about that, but the business model revolves around virtual goods. In Atmosphir you can build and create anything for free; but we focus on the player experience, and you'll be able to customise your character is lots of different ways - what we'll be selling is items, and things like that.

We'll also have a subscription called the Players' Club, and if you pay monthly you can get items you can't even buy. It's very simple, but it's been successful for other games.

We've in a live beta - anyone can go to Atmosphir.com and play now. We've added a nifty feature that allows you to play as a guest, so you don't even need an account. But this is huge; we'll actually be one of the first Unity games to be playable on the Hi5 social network, and we're launching that shortly.

We'll also have a downloadable version - because the game can be played in a browser, or you can install the Mac or PC downloadable version, which should be launched in December.

So the game's finished, but we're still fixing and tweaking and doing other stuff. It's a service model, so we want to ramp that up on an ongoing basis.

We're not doing any marketing at all, we're looking at organic growth - the game's out there and it's a word of mouth thing, which has been helpful for us. We're registering 1000 users per day at the moment, which isn't a lot, but it's a lot for us right now.

Well, what I can tell you is that we're still in pre-revenue - we're not profitable, but we're looking to become cash-positive in a year or so.

I'm not quite sure yet, but I was talking to some other people about Union, and anything that allows developers to take their games to other platforms is great. If I can have Atmosphir on aeroplanes, in cars, in set-top boxes, that would be amazing.

How it would work, I'm not sure of the details, but I think it's a great move, even though it's only in the early stages. Maybe in the future we could think about it for us.

Well, that's another thing that's exciting for us too - as we've thought about other platforms in the past, maybe the design experience is best on the PC, because of the mouse and keyboard. But something could be a play-only version, taking 70-80,000 levels created by people and making them playable on your TV, for example.

There's a lot of flexibility there, and with each platform we'll look at what its strengths are - and what makes the most sense.

We're already working on an iPad version, so we are definitely looking, aggressively, to new platforms. It makes sense to at least have a presence, but what I understand of the new ways in which gaming will be consumed, it's that you'll have different experiences of the same game across different platforms. That's what I feel.

I can foresee an iPhone version of Atmosphir where maybe you're not even playing, you're just dressing your character and getting it ready - so when you get home you can play right away. But that's the beauty of Unity - it allows you to port without too much effort.