Force of Nature

It’s been good, it’s had some great reviews. People have seen a more serious side to a genre that’s previously been viewed as a bit of a clown subject, with some other hunting titles featuring wrestling snakes and so on. Actually when we started developing theHunter we were going for a more fun and games type of experience. For example, we had one idea initially where the players would be dressed up in a clown suit in a world full of bears and the player that could get from start to finish without being killed by a bear would win. We hadn’t implemented that idea at the point that the feedback started coming in for the serious side of the game however and when everyone that played it fed back on how enjoyable the more realistic hunting experience was we knew that we had to keep the clown parts out. We decided to forget about the craziness and make it more of a simulation.

It’s really a timing thing. We only recently decided to establish the studio and the Expansive Worlds managing director, Stefan Pettersson, joined us at the beginning of May. Prior to that we just had 2 – 3 people working on the game since acquiring the licence at the end of 2009 so they haven’t really come to the point where they are changing the branding from Avalanche to the Expansive World branding. That will happen very soon though. Also, Emote is no longer around and has nothing to do with the game anymore so the Emote name and logo will also be removed. Expansive Worlds will be the developer working on theHunter going forward so it will be branded accordingly.

Yep, they’re here in this building and will remain so. They’re a subsidiary of Avalanche with their own finances and I’m not involved in their daily business just on the board of directors so they exist as a separate studio but they’re not so separate that they require a separate premises.

They’re focussing 100 per cent on theHunter right now, on picking up development on that and updating it. There are certainly plans to expand the company with a focus on more social games and building online communities around those. Right now though, it’s about getting back the confidence from the community for theHunter and to start releasing updates, to get that up and running before we start releasing anything else from that studio.

More online community games, actually, so that could be handheld or console or PC and there could be interactions between those platforms also. We’re looking at 100 per cent download only, we have toyed with doing a retail release of theHunter but we’re not sure about that.

Well as I mention we just got out of a very tough 2009 and so far this year we’ve started a new project and released Just Cause 2. We always wanted to be a multi-project company and throughout 2007 we grew up to 175 staff and we were working on four simultaneous projects, it was really just too much. It became a focus issue, we had a number of key members of staff who were working on numerous projects and it got to the point that our time was so split between the different projects that the focus was non-existent. Then we ran in to a lot of problems at the end of 2008 and we laid off staff so at that point we had to take a few steps back and look at our business.

We’re here to develop games, that’s what the heart and passion of our company is about, we’re not here to be purely focused on the corporate side. Of course we want to be profitable and make money but that’s not the driving force. So we’ve decided to work on one project at a time until that project gets to a point, maybe a year or two in to development and then see if we can allow some of the more central roles to focus on something else whilst the remaining team members focus continuing development. If we think at that point that we need to keep those people on that project for a while longer then we’ll do that, we’re keen not to overstretch.

So far it’s working really well, there’s now a lot more motivation in the studio and it’s certainly more fun coming to work.