Indeed, Introversion games frequently feel like the kind of game you'd carry over to your friend's house on a 5.25" inch floppy when dinosaurs ruled the earth. I asked if that feeling was intentional. "Yes, I think that's definitely part of the Introversion aesthetic," though he added, "I'm not sure it's entirely intentional, but often seems to end up that way, mainly because it was a really creative and exciting period for game design, and we were growing up in the midst of it all." As of late, he says, "We've lost a lot of that fearlessness in the pursuit of innovation and great ideas in recent years, perhaps because the stakes are so much higher. It's all about making a profit nowadays, and the suits are the ones to determine what games will be profitable, not the developers, so we end up with this cookie-cutter approach to game development, with many publishers getting stuck in the design rut."
Moving back toward the graphics question, he says, "One of the great things about creating games with a retro look and feel is that they immediately stand out against the latest photorealistic offerings - no one ever confused Darwinia for anything else. One of our proudest moments was winning an award for artistic excellence, for Darwinia, at last year's IGF awards, despite the fact that we've never had an artist working on our games. It just goes to show that photorealism is not the only avenue for the developer to take."
As a very small, very indie developer, Introversion tries "to stick to a simple design model ... keeping content procedurally generated and to a minimum, working with stylized graphics and focusing on ambient elements like the soundtrack to enhance the mood and feel of a game. This is purely down to lack of resources and making the most of what we have. Troubles tend to arise when we depart from that model, as we did with Darwinia." Darwinia was Introversion's most ambitious game, he says. "Darwinia had a lot more content in it than Uplink or DEFCON. It was also stylistically a much more challenging project, which meant that instead of taking the predicted 18 months to complete, it actually took us three years. This left us with a real financial headache, and by the end of it all, our morale was running pretty low. DEFCON was a dream to make in comparison, because there's virtually no content in it, it's just a pure game that's scenario driven."
Delay is tight-lipped when I ask about their next game, Subversion, and opens with, "Actually, if I'd had my way originally, no one would even know the name of our next game! Not only that, but for the first time, I've been persuaded into sharing a lot more about the development process of this game with our fans, and we've set up a company blog for this purpose." He was a bit apprehensive about posting anything, he says. "You can set up expectations when you divulge too much too early, and you're bound to cause disappointment when you make changes and the end product is different [from] what people were expecting. Because of this, we're not making any promises, and we won't be talking about the features in-game, or how the final game will play. The development process has always been pretty fluid at Introversion, and we're not even sure ourselves what we're aiming for yet. Subversion has also really just gone into serious development, although it's an idea that's been floating 'round in the company archives for quite some time, as far back as 2002. It was put on hold while we were finishing off Darwinia and DEFCON, and [has] been bubbling away in the back of our minds for years, so it's had the most thinking time of all our games, and should hopefully reflect that in the end result." I will acknowledge being a fan of the company to the point that knowing the title made me happy. It's about subverting. Awesome!
