Darwinia developer Introversion has already published their blogs describing what a ”crap” year 2008 was for them, but now things are bright again.
Gone is the total despair, but it’s still a ”major slap in the face” to miss out on the indie revolution. Right now the studio has all the eggs in one ”Microsoft shaped basket,” not ideal.
”The company we’d founded together out of university was almost dead, the Directors took it in turns to lose the will to continue for a few days at a time, and it all looked pretty bleak for a while,” said Introversion’s Chris Delay.
While they were flailing their arms wildly, trying to make sense of all this sudden misfortune and where to go from there - a mini revolution was underway in indie land.
”An indie game revolution has been occurring while this was happening to us, with countless small teams of two or three guys putting together amazingly cool games and getting genuine commercial success out of it,” he said.
”Indie has become a viable genre of its own, with its own style and quirks.”
”To not be a part of that revolution - to in fact realise that we were the ‘older’ indie, already too big and too slow to effectively compete, was a major slap in the face.”
Right now the developer has hopes high with Defcon DS now free of legal problems after it’s developer Pinnacle went bust, they can now try to sell it to a publisher. ”We’ve had a lot of interest since announcing that, so we’re crossing our fingers,” added Delay.
”We’re back on the ascendancy, with a truly terrible year behind us, and a new sense of clarity and purpose,” he continued. Right now success lies with releasing Darwinia+ and they plan on getting work done with Subversion again.
”Assuming Darwinia+ does okay, there will be four people working on Subversion including myself, and there will be a momentum behind it such that it can’t be stopped again.”
”This is not a situation we would ever deliberately put ourselves in - all eggs in one Microsoft shaped basket, but that’s where we are, and for the first time in a long while, I’m feeling confident.”
Darwinia+ is being exclusively released on XBLA this September 29th.
Source: Eurogamer
