Eternal Champions

We actually found that people are very attracted to that idea. We gained a lot of traction when we said we want to work on a console game. We're working with a high quality engine and that excited a lot of people, especially in Philadelphia where there's not a lot of work in console development available. People still want to work in this space.

We're self-funding the demo. The goal is to pitch to publishers at E3 to secure a publishing deal and we'll pitch a functional demo showing the core game mechanics, gameplay, your standard stuff.

To follow up on Lou's point, we're not interested in building a game to flip. We want to build a relationship with a publisher where we offer a great team that's good to work with and offers a high quality product and the publisher wants to work with again and again. We're driving for that because that creates an appeal the whole way around. That's a true symbiotic relationship, it's not about just getting funds for the next title. We need to know a publisher enjoys the things we create and we enjoy working with them, and they can distribute the game for positive value.

Right now the studio is at 20 people. For the first project when we go into full production it's probably going to grow to around 30-35. There are plans down the road if we're successful we'd like to build the company even bigger and get multiple projects working simultaneously so we can have full-time employees like concept artists working, instead of hiring them to work for three months. We don't want to get to 500 people but we do want to have multiple projects in the pipeline.

Studio culture for us is really important. You have to have that personal trust and personal chemistry. We've been really influenced by Irrational Games when they talk about how they hire and we want our guys to not think that's it's four of us making decisions from on high.

It's interesting how we manage it. Each of the owners comes from a different background. One's a coder, one's a designer, one's an artist and we have a business guy. So each group is managed independently by their leads. There's a solid foundation of understanding of all the different core disciplines we need for our projects.

We've set it up so the owners of the company answer to the producers. We have to be interested in product success but not interested in saving people's feelings. We need to be called out if things are wrong. It's been one of our company pillars, we've been transparent.

We encourage vertical communication. An artist shouldn't stop talking to me about issues. We send bi-weekly reports by producers saying what people have worked on, what they haven't worked on.

We were talking with an Xbox manager and they were telling us how they get a lot of titles in, but the titles they think are going to be successful are the ones that are polished. Really, to make money on any of the systems you need to be one of the games that's going to be promoted by them.

One of the pillars of our company is making triple-A quality games. Our design, our audio, our engineering are all going to be triple-A. Even though we're not making a $60 game with 40 hours of gameplay, we're making a $20 game with 8-10 hours of gameplay, it's going to be a triple-A game. We're going to step above the other companies by being the best in every single area.

And that's the next challenge for us to take because we have to look at ourselves in the mirror very harshly every two to three weeks and ask "is it playing good or is it playing good enough?". We need to get beyond good enough. And that's about iteration and polish. We need to take the extra step, the extra sprint in the dev cycle to pull out a particular feature.

Everybody so far has been pushing themselves beyond where there talents are, and saying "this is what I can do, how can I take it to the next step?"

My feeling is, absolutely. But you have to think about it smartly because memorable IP usually encourages continuation of that work. Look at Halo or God of War as examples. You've got memorable IP and a memorable world so you just keep on mining it because it's rich, it's fertile. Our theory is that if we go in with the IP we're currently working on and build that concept of a rich world into it, then when we go to talk to potential publishers about a partnership we can say this game is great and we can continue to mine this for future downloadable content - which I'm convinced is going to be a fantastic new avenue, especially with the easy tracking that opens up.

Everyone who downloaded a game logs in so we can track them with us saying "here's some more great content for that game world". I think game developers have to take that realisation that we have to build the IP in such a way that people will want to live and play in that world.

We're building a world in which there's more than one story. We build a world with one story and it's our first game but we think there are other stories in this world. There are other avenues to explore, we're not building a one-shot game - we're building something that we can continue to play.

And that's across different media, even.

It's all about execution. There's an opportunity if you're able to create an convincing world with interesting characters and populate that.

But the gameplay should drive the transmedia. The game has to be fun no matter what - but if the gameplay is fun then the act of being in that world shows you where other bits of content can be created. Maybe you brush up against a character who might be spun off, or a place that can become a series of web comics or whatever. There are companies that do it very, very well where you're actively engaged in a scene and it can be taken to another media.

We talk a lot about the comic book platform. Introducing characters in a comic that can be introduced to a game later as part of downloadable content. Cross-pollination for people that want to enjoy the worlds and enjoy the characters, they're rewarded. Comics have been doing that for a while. It happened with the Matrix where if you played the game you got more back-story and knowledge of what's going on. We've spent a lot of time debating narrative points and going through and making sure the world we're doing is cohesive.