They’ve been plugging away on the project for 100 days ”with no distractions from any kind of corporate overlord,” said Fargo. Design pages are in the hundreds - basic UI ”up-and-running”.
The studio boss and veteran designer used his keynote at this year’s Unite conference to give a rallying shout to ‘creative autonomy’ and what it means to go solo.
”We have hundreds of pages of design done, we have our first music in, we have our basic UI up-and-running, and we’ve taken our first screenshots,” Fargo declared. ”The bottom line is that, without any interruption, we’re kicking ass.”
He believes the industry has ”come full circle” with developers shunning the console structure of the nineties and returning to the era of ”two and three man teams” running the show, thanks to the rise of new platforms and digital distribution. Extensive kits like Unity and crowd-sourcing avenues like Kickstarter are invaluable, he adds.
InXile rose about $3 million for its Kickstarter Wasteland 2 project, and have helped raise the profile of crowd-sourcing game development alongside Tim Schafer’s Double Fine.
”I’m slow to the party on this one, but we’re really utilising it in a big way. People ask why we chose Unity, and it has a lot of technical positives, but really, for me, it came down to the store, the communication and the sharing of knowledge. That’s the real power of Unity; it’s not the technical aspects. You can’t beat the crowd,” continued Fargo.
At present Wasteland 2 uses 49 assets from Unity’s Assets Store but InXile expect to use around 500 by the time the RPG reaches fans. The sharing of know-how with Unity has rapidly accelerated the game’s development and helped the studio spend their pledged funds from the community much more efficiently.
”Corporations don’t have artistic integrity; people do,” Fargo stated.
”This sort of integrity impacts on production and how a property is exploited… There are employees of these organisations that have this integrity, but they don’t have the power to do anything about it.”
”The best creative work we’re seeing is from creative people who have the power, or the financing, to control their destinies… These visionaries can be within an organisation: Rockstar would not achieve the level of quality it does if Sam Houser wasn’t running that place with an iron fist. He’s not a corporation; he’s a person.”
He also began the Kicking It Forward initiative through Kickstarter which sees those who sign up pledge 5% of their profits to be injected back into the Kickstarter pool. Around 100 different projects have joined the cause so far. ”If one Minecraft comes along, that’s going to put $2 million or $3 million back into the ecosystem to for other people, and it’s going to help find the next one,” enthused Fargo.
You can keep up-to-date with Wasteland 2’s development via its official Kickstarter page.
