By: Chris Delay

A Game Emerges from the Chaos

In my last blog entry I told you a little about how we got started with Introversion’s second game Darwinia. The loss of my day-time job had enabled me to launch into the Darwinia project with renewed enthusiasm, and I think it was this time out that helped me to finally start seeing the makings of a game hidden amongst all the confusion.

We’d always had a fascination with fractal landscape systems, ever since the Amiga program “Vista Pro”. The basic concept was that you could generate an entire landscape – in fact a very detailed and realistic looking landscape – from absolutely nothing, using fractal mathematics. The benefits were obvious – we could use this to generate our battlefields without having to do it all by hand. Within these fractal worlds we used our placeholder “LaserTrooper” and gave them some basic AI abilities – they knew how to fire lasers at each other, they could throw grenades, and they’d stick together in groups as they moved around the fractal landscape. Ten months after starting work, and we had something recognisable as a game playing out in front of us. Three primary coloured armies would spawn and fight each other until only one remained. This was the closest we ever came to our original concept of massive sprite armies fighting each other, and would (many years later) be the inspiration for the Multiplayer sequel “Multiwinia”.

We love Retro

Twelve months into development, and we finally settled on the idea of a retro-themed gameworld. Our landscapes would be retro, the characters would be retro, the monsters would be retro. Even the sounds would be retro. We went retro mad. We took our love of great movies like Tron, and our love of old Amiga classics, and mixed it all together in a giant melting pot.

But something was seriously troubling us. We had this great looking demo, and huge sprite armies that spawned and fought each other. But we didn’t have a game – there was nothing for the player to do. You could select groups of Laser Troopers and give them movement orders, but the process was tedious and uninvolving. Nagging fears began to enter our minds that we didn’t have anything playable on our hands, despite working for a whole year on the project. We’d crafted a beautiful rolling demo, and nothing more.

Panic began to set in. We knew we had a limited amount of time to finish this game before we’d be out of cash. Myself and Andy were now both working fulltime, meaning Introversion was our only source of income. We spent months searching for a game in all of our tech demos, to little avail. Fundamentally, controlling hundreds of Laser Troopers at a time just wasn’t fun. We needed to rethink – it dawned on us that the original concept of massive armies was not a game – it was a screensaver, something that would look great but be no fun to play. It was back to the drawing board.

First Playable

The vital ingredient that we’d been missing all along was the individual controls. After days of playing old Amiga games searching for inspiration, we hit on Cannon Fodder and Syndicate. Both games put you in control of a small 4 or 5 man team, giving you direct mouse control over their actions. Left click would move them somewhere, Right click would fire their weapons. It was visceral and intuitive, and great fun. We finally had our avatars – five heavily armed soldiers under your direct control. The original design of 100,000 troops had been reduced all the way down to a 5 man team, and at last, it was fun to play. After a staggering nineteen months of development, we had our first playable.

We also had no money. Introversion’s bank account had run dry. FutureWar was supposed to have been a short twelve month project and was already way over budget, and nowhere near finished. Our creative panic was replaced with financial panic, and we held a series of crisis meetings in which our entire company was very nearly disbanded. These were tough decisions to make, but everyone agreed – we wanted to finish this game, we wanted to play out this opportunity and see if we could form and sustain our own games company. In hindsight it was insanity – we borrowed money from banks and parents, all on the hope that we could make it to the end of the project and make back that money. Tom put pretty much everything he owned on Ebay. But if this was going to be our last project, we would put everything we had into it, and we would make the game we wanted to make.

Production Under Pressure

Having literally no money of your own has one major benefit – it is hugely motivating. Now that we had all the ingredients of our game, we worked incredibly hard to put it all together. Over the next few months we worked all hours available to us. We stitched together the outline of an entire game, with ten levels and several different types of monster. Our multiplayer plans were shelved because we just didn’t have the time to finish them anymore, and multiplayer was no longer the obvious fit for the game we were making. The story was finalised and the name was set : we were making Darwinia, a single player action strategy game, set in a retro videogame world. Production went ahead at breakneck speed, as much out of confidence as out of necessity. For the first time we could see the end product - we just had to get there before our personal finances became so desperate we’d be forced to give up.

With the final visual style in place, and many levels already completed, Introversion Software began demonstrating the game to journalists in August 2004, 26 months after starting work. The response we received was incredible – at first they didn’t know what they were looking at, but as we slowly explained the story and the setting, their eyes would just widen. Introversion was still a company known for only one game – Uplink – a moody, 2d interface driven, very low budget hacking simulator. Darwinia came out of nowhere for many journalists, and the size and scope and beauty of the game took them very much by surprise. We were still financially broke and many months away from finishing, but those initial responses from those journalists were hugely encouraging to us, and gave us the confidence we needed to see the project through to the end, whatever happened.

The difficult second album launches

Darwinia was eventually finished in early 2005 and shipped in March that year. The reviews of our game were awesome – we picked up numerous “90 percent” scores and tons of awards. Darwinia did not sell brilliantly on launch – it took a long time to develop a fan following. But its visual style and retro charm made it a cult hit amongst fans around the world.

And this is the reason why that moment on stage in 2006 at the IGF awards was such an incredible moment for me and for our team – because in that moment as the crowd of 5000 gamers cheered to our victory, I was remembering the three years of development that it took to make the game that good, the eighteen months of experimenting with tech demos, the entire year without any income and massive personal debt, and all the decisions we made along the way. It was a vindicating moment for us that made all that effort seem worthwhile.

For more information on Introversion’s work in progress: Darwinia+ stay tuned to GDN or check out their new site at www.darwiniaplus.com.