thatgamecompany's Kellee Santiago

I think so - Jenova and I have always viewed thatgamecompany as an incredible opportunity and I think with that approach everything is less daunting. We weren't out to make a games company - we weren't really interested in just going into business for ourselves, and it's a real pain to do that...

So we always thought as long as we're going to do it, we'd take it as an opportunity to make the kind of games that we want. If we hadn't found a good partner, thatgamecompany just wouldn't have existed, at that time at least. We'd have gone to work at other studios and regrouped at another time when we thought interest would be greater.

Looking back it was a really great way to approach the situation, because it led us to finding really amenable partners at Sony Santa Monica, who initially were part-publisher and part-mentor to us - they really helped us to learn more about the shipping process of making games, and working with the publisher... and they also allowed us to discover a creative focus process that we use at thatgamecompany.

I remember after Jenova and I had our initial meeting with Sony, we hugged in the parking lot - you could just tell, we really resonated with each other. That's been something I've been so thankful to learn as a recent business owner - how much of a relationship with anyone in business exists outside of the contract.

You can negotiate all of the ownership and rights that you want, but there's an aspect of it that just can't be contracted - which is the relationship you have as business partners. I've been very thankful that we partnered and put our trust in the right people.

We initially shifted from Cloud to flOw as our first title on PS3, because flOw was more fleshed-out as a design, and an easier first project to tackle. There are so many challenges with just starting up a company and working with a publisher - and none of us had shipped a commercial title before.

So we wanted to mitigate some of those challenges, though it still turned out to be much more than we bargained for... We'd initially scoped a game twice as big, that would take half as long - but that was just our own naivete. Apparently our producer at that time at Sony always knew we were being over-ambitious, so he went easy on us.

That was one of the major hurdles - we had a team that was slightly smaller than Cloud. Myself, John Edwards (who we met through the independent games circuit), Nick Clarke (our lead designer, who'd worked on the Flash game flOw), and Jenova.

We were very green - the biggest challenge in growing from that small size to something that's still relatively small but three times that size now was just the modes and frequency of communication about our process, and discovering what sort of production process we needed to structure the creative process we wanted to have at the core of thatgamecompany.

It's something we're still iterating on.