BAFTA Presents: Introversion – Darwinia + and Beyond

Independent game developers, or ‘Indies’ as they have become known of late, have risen to the top of the pile in the video game industry over the past few years. One of those developers is the British outfit known as Introversion Software. They originally started out in 2001 as a four man team and have remained so since. Along the way they have recruited others to their cause of bringing interesting and innovative games to the masses, but for the most part they remain a team of four.

I went along to a talk that was hosted by BAFTA on the evening of 19th February where Chris Delay and Mark Morris gave a presentation to both industry professionals as well as members of the community that have sprung up around the games they have made. They certainly have an ardent following that are just as passionate about the games Introversion make as they do in creating them.

The primary aim of the talk was to show off what Introversion have made in the past, primarily Darwinia + which has just appeared on the Xbox Live Market Place as of 10th February 2010. They also spoke at length on what they plan to do in the future in the form of Subversion. They also make a point of putting a nail into Darwinia, but more on that later.

The presentation opened with Mark Morris describing the game Darwinia +. This was a little redundant as a vast majority of the audience (myself included), were familiar with the game. Nevertheless Mark persevered and gave a quick demonstration of the game, which I shall now share with you so you’re not in the dark any more than the 3 people in the audience who hadn’t played it before!

The game is set in a computer war simulation that has been developed by the fictional Dr  Sepulveda. The player takes the role of someone who has logged into the simulation. The Doctor greets the player and explains that it is currently being attacked by a virus and it is the player’s task to vanquish it from the simulation. A key element of this programme is the inclusion of Darwinians. These are simple AI constructs that the simulation generates. They cannot be manipulated directly by the player, but instead guided by the use of Officers who are promoted within the ranks of Darwinians. The other Darwinians follow the orders of the Officers without question, who are in turn acting under the command of the player.

One of the most striking things about Darwinia + is graphical style. It is a simple series of basic geometric shapes that many people view as place holder graphics as opposed to the final product! Mark explained that this style drove the story of the game, as Introversion wanted to create a war simulation with tens of thousands of little creatures blowing the merry hell out of each other. The only way they could do this without bringing the whole game engine to its knees was to simplify the graphics. By doing so, the story and form of the Darwinian’s was born.

Other elements of the game showed direct influences to a rather obvious piece of pop culture, namely Tron. There is a unit called ‘Engineers’ in Darwinia + that look not too dissimilar to the Recogniser drones in Tron. Mark joked that yes, they were directly ‘ripped off’ from the 1982 Disney homage to video games, but he was fairly confident Disney weren’t about to go after them about it. Nevertheless he was asked by Microsoft to take out insurance prior to them agreeing to let the game appear on Xbox Live Arcade against the risk of Introversion being sued for copyright breaches!

It was a long and drawn out process Introversion ploughed through in order to get Darwinia + onto Xbox Live Arcade. Originally a PC game, the company assumed that the conversion process from a PC game to an Xbox 360 game would be relatively painless. Sadly they were wrong. Whilst the core of the game was ported over quickly, the elements that made the game work on the console were less than straight forward to fix. It was something Mark was quite candid about during the talk. Whilst most developers would describe the apparent long gestation process of making their games to be simply ‘polishing’, Introversion were actually fixing Darwinia + over this period, for the core of the game itself was pretty much complete.

The sales of Darwinia + have thus far met the expectations of the team. Mark explained they couldn’t reveal the exact figure as Microsoft put such data within an NDA. It has provided them with enough funding to continue with their next project, Subversion. Before the presentation went on to describe that game, Mark showed a short film that marked the end of Darwinia for Introversion. This film showed various images of models of Darwinians being destroyed in increasingly bizarre and horrific ways. The highlight for me was when they strapped a Darwinian to a Catherine Wheel and watch it explode. All of this was shown over the soundtrack of The Doors ‘The End’. I believe we were being treated to some cathartic like therapy.

After that the reigns of the talk were handed over to Chris Delay. He wanted to tell us about Introversion’s next project; Subversion. As with Darwinia, the engine of the game drove its conception rather than story and concept. Subversion has always been a side project for Introversion as it has been in development alongside other titles including DEFCON and Multiwinia. Initially all it did was create cities using a self developed procedural generation tool. Seeing this reminded me of the David Braben talk I attended at BAFTA last year in which he described how Elite used a random model to generate content procedurally. The difference here is that whilst Braben and his then co-hort Ian Bell did it because they had to due to a lack of memory, Chris Delay was doing it to generate interesting and varied content, nothing more. He spent many moons on this engine and he explained that he and the rest of Introversion took great pleasure in watching it create virtual cities based on the parameters he fed into it. The trouble was there was no game!

So they thought about what they could do with this city creating tool and decided to once again look into the things that inspire them creatively, which is essentially the action films they saw as children. The one film they cited was Sneakers. Although Tron was again brought up, as well as Impossible Mission (the TV series, not the films). From this they came upon the idea of making it into a game based on espionage. The core of the game is that the player has to break into high security installations by any means necessary. All of these places are randomly generated and thus every play through is different. This leads on to the jewel in many a video game crown, that being ‘emergent gameplay’, where due to a sequence of events occurring within the game, another completely new set of unexpected occurrences spring up.

Chris walked through a very early build of the game. It opened up with an outline of an office floor and two green circles outside it. These circles represented the agents that are under the players control. Their direction is represented by a wedge in the circle, a little like Pac-Man’s mouth that is half closed. This was spotted by Mark Morris who then hoped Namco weren’t going to come after them over it, much like Disney had yet to do over Darwinia.

Chris moved the agents around the outside of the office and as he did so, parts of its interior started to be revealed,  at least the parts that could be seen through a window or an open door. Chris then moved the agents into the office, at which point more of the office was revealed to the player. All of this was somewhat like a fog-of-war mechanic that is found in RTS games, only on a smaller scale. Chris then decided to use some of the tools the agents have at their disposal. They are primarily espionage aids that allow agents to carry out the missions without being caught in the process. The first tool Chris used was a scanner. This highlighted the area around the agents without them having to move into the area and thus bringing attention to themselves. The scanner revealed a series of toilet booths, which was not the intended target for these agents. Chris quipped at this point that the toilets were one of the first things that were modelled for Subversion and thus, he claimed, Introversion maintained the tradition of developers being obsessed over the bodily functions of people in their games!

Chris then sent off one of his agents on a recon mission to find the intended target, that being a server room. As he did so he encountered some people in the office who appear as red circles with the same Pac-Man like wedge indicating their direction of travel and what way they are facing. Being office workers, they ignored the agent and went about their business, leaving him to roam the place to find the server room. Eventually he stumbles into the security room where he attempts to hack into the system to gain control of the CCTV in the office. Sadly there are two security guards in the office who then taser the agent to the ground!

Unperturbed by this set back, Chris uses a cheat to gain access to the cameras anyway to demonstrate how this can be done, provided the player doesn’t blunder into security rooms that have guards in them! At which point the server room is revealed and the other agent is sent in to destroy it. He does this by first shooting the lock off the door with an assault rifle. Unsurprisingly, this raises the alarm in the building and whist the office workers flee, security guards start running towards the agent. At which point Chris panics and orders the agent to hurl an explosive into the server room, ending the mission.

Chris rounded off the demonstration by saying that Subversion will be released ‘one day’, with some time in 2011 being mooted as probable on Introversion Software’s web site.

Q&A Summary

What follows is a selection of questions that were asked by the audience. I have not included all of the questioned asked as I have instead place them within the body of the write up of the talk itself.

Did you start off the surge in Independent Developers?

No was the answer to this. Mark was insistent that it was a question of timing. Introversion Software came into being just as the concept of digital distribution and self publishing started to become a valid means to make and sell games.

What’s the lead format for Subversion?

Chris explained that the game is being developed for both PC and consoles. He did however state that Introversion Software was primarily focussed on the PC but conceded that it would be folly for any developer to release PC only titles due to the narrow revenue stream that creates.

Has the ever increasing number of similarly sized independent developers decreased the prominence of Introversion Software?

Mark did not think this was the case at all as the games Introversion produce speak for themselves.

What is Introversion Software’s view on the pricing of independently developed games?

Mark explained that Valve have a very interesting strategy when it comes to pricing of games. Steam has a system where they drop the price of games to a very small amount for a short period of time. While this appears to be very risky at first, the volumes the games sell at sky-rockets and makes up for the lack of price by sheer volume of sales. Editorial: The same can be said for iPhone and Xbox Live titles that have been discounted of late and have seen sales climb as a result.

Why do the Darwinians look like little match-stick men?

Chris explained that in order to get the volume of creatures into the game, they had to simplify the models that made them up, hence the basic little figures. In Darwinia + they have been upgraded to 64×64 HD sprites that, to quote Mark; ‘have gone mad’.

What happened to the ‘Assault Mode’ in Darwinia +

Multiwinia boasted an Assault Mode that required one team to defend a bomb until it went off, whilst the other team had to attack them and destroy the bomb before it detonated. Chris said that it was removed from Darwinia + because it was ‘rubbish’ and didn’t suit the game at all well. Mark contested this and thought it was fun, but explained that the engine behind Darwinia + couldn’t cope with the Darwinian population required to have an Assault mode in it and thus it was removed. Chris then continued to bemoan the mode by saying it was fun to watch, but not at all diverting to play!

What became of ‘Chronometer’?

Mark explained that in 2008 Channel 4 approached Introversion Software to make a game that was funded by both Channel 4 and 1066 Productions. Called Chronometer, the game was developed to a point and pitched to Channel 4. Sadly it fell through as they thought it to be too expensive to produce and ambitious. It has since been shelved.

Are there any plans to port DEFCON to other formats?

An attempt was made to port it to the DS, with a fully functioning game being completed. Sadly no publisher picked it up and it remains in one of Introversion Software’s desk draws. The company has no intention of making any games for the iPhone at present due to the volatile marketplace that is the App Store. Editorial: One possibility is to port it to DSi Ware, but there is the risk of it being too large a game to fit into that platform.

Summary

Well that’s enough from me and Introversion Software. I certainly found the talk to be entertaining as well as informative. We’re currently working on a video review for Darwinia +, which will appear within the next week or so after publishing this article. Thanks for reading!

-           Chris “Kropotkin” O’Regan