The benefit of this kind of progress is that Introversion is growing with every game - releasing Multiwinia is now a lot easier than it would have been, because we've tons of experience in making multiplayer work reliably now. “We'd never done anything multiplayer before, so we had to create all of the game logic, network code, and all the server infrastructure stuff from scratch. Of course, it was new to Introversion too. The shooting death-count, the rising tension: it's classic multiplayer, without being anything like any mainstream multiplayer game out there. “The basic game of Defcon was set in stone very early on (it's a simpler game than Darwinia) and most of the challenge with Defcon revolved around solid Internet multiplayer.” What players have talked about with the most enthusiasm is the clarity and balance that DefCon offers. What is Delay learning now? “Darwinia was a big creative learning experience for us, but for Defcon it was much more about the technical challenges,” Delay explains. Introversion have talked on a number of occasions about what they've learned in their rapid progression from Uplink, the simple, quirky hacking game, to the Tron-alike action-strategy of Darwinia, but now they've moved on to multiplayer, with the thermonuclear Wargames homage DefCon, and a multiplayer sequel to Darwinia, Multiwinia.
Read on for thoughts on Multiwinia, Subversion, and the future of Introversion. We've found that players like the choice – some people want the convenience of Steam, some people want it direct from the creators and not tied to any system, and some people like to walk into town to buy.”Īnd some of us just want to get rid of the towers of CDs and DVD boxes that currently dominate our tiny box-room offices. With Defcon (and all of our future games, we hope) we released the game on Steam and on our website and in the high street simultaneously. Certainly with Darwinia, Steam was kind of a saviour for us and sold Darwinia in quantities we'd never seen before.
From a company point of view Valve offer a direct link to a huge number of customers who might otherwise never have heard of our games. After installing Steam I had easy access to the latest versions of every game I'd bought over the system. I recently reached the end of my patience with Vista and wiped the hard disk, and installed XP from scratch. “Of course we'd say that, since all three of our games are now available to buy on Steam. Introversion came away from the IGF as stars, but are now somewhat distancing themselves from their indie roots, with increased commercial success thanks to their exposure on Valve's Steam sales platform: “We're big fans,” says Delay. I think people's interest in indie gaming has been slowly rising and this is definitely a good thing.” It's worth keeping up with events like the IGF - a lot of teams that do well show up later as serious game developers. So how does Introversion's central programmer, the superbly-named Chris Delay, feel about independent game development in 2007? “Alive and well! PCs are still the best place to play genuinely indie games made by very small teams. These titles do what indie games do best: surprise, entertain, and challenge. Uplink, Darwinia and DefCon each have their own encapsulated, deliberately self-contained idea, and each sits just outside the commercial comfort zones. It's not a Retro appeal, so much as timeless.
One such home-grown PC team are the British IGF winners, Introversion, who have been something of an inspiration in their attitude towards game development: the kinds of games they have decided to develop appeal to something basic about gaming.
The spirit of the bedroom programmers of the '80s is just about living on PCs across the world. One of the PC's finest features is its ability to allow small, eccentric development teams to create great games without constraints.