Darwinia Q&A with Chris Delay of Introversion Software - Interviews

It's not every day that the gaming industry produces something fresh, new, and wholly unexpected. Darwinia is just one of those titles. We talk with lead game designer, Chris Delay, about the project -- from the downsides to being an indie UK developer trying to crack the North America market to Darwinia's minimalist interface. Delay also discusses Darwinia's soundtrack, reading negative and positive reviews, and working as a small team. Thanks for your time, Chris!

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Darwinia Q&A with Chris Delay of Introversion Software

Conducted by Omni

First, the basics: your name, role on Darwinia, and how long you’ve been in the gaming industry.

My name is Chris Delay and I’m the lead game designer at Introversion on all our games, including Darwinia. I’ve been in the games industry since 2000.

Without sounding too much like a commercial, what is Darwinia all about?

It’s about a virtual world running inside a massive super computer. It’s populated by a sentient digital lifeform – the Darwinians – who’ve evolved over thousands of generations. And they’re in trouble from a virus that has invaded their system and is slowly wiping them out.

In the Armchair Empire’s review of Darwinia, I made a minor comparison between Darwinia and the classic puzzle game Lemmings. What “inspirations” went into Darwinia?

We tend to describe Darwinia as Cannon-Fodder meets Lemmings, with a Tron theme. Of course, that only works on gamers who were around during the Amiga days.

Was Darwinia’s interface the result of wanting to try something new?

Partly it was an artistic decision – we’re so proud of the look of Darwinia and we wanted to show it off with a minimum of clutter. But also it was a design decision – we wanted skilled players to get completely zoned while playing Darwinia, and that meant an unobstructed view of the gameworld and a very carefully designed control mechanism.

Darwinia features very spartan graphics but they’re suited to the gameplay and setting. What went into designing and developing the graphics?

As a small developer we have to use our weaknesses as strengths – we only have a hand full of people which means we can’t make things look realistic, but it does mean we can experiment with off the wall concepts and ideas that the bigger companies can’t go near. We spent a ton of time experimenting, and the retro Tron style was something we hit on quite early – it’s relatively easy to create with a very small team, and it looks incredible.

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Did Introversion Software develop Darwinia to make money? Or was it born out of an altruistic attempt to create something unique to show the industry it doesn’t take a lot of money to make a great game?

Not really either to be honest. We certainly didn’t develop Darwinia to make money – if we had then we’d need our head examined! But we had no real interest in showing other people what could be done – we just wanted to make a game that we were proud of and we felt was creative an experimental in some way.

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Currently, there’s no publisher for Darwinia. Do you ever expect to find one?

Publishers aren’t really interested. That’s the bottom line we’ve realised. We are big enough to self publish in the UK , but the USA is around ten times larger and we just don’t have the staff. The only way for us to reach the US shops would be to find a US publication deal, and we’ve shown Darwinia to a ton of publishers with that aim, but non of them have shown any significant interest.

Having said that, we can now offer immediate downloads of purchased products from our Darwinia website – so American customers can buy and play immediately without having to wait for delivery.

Reading positive reviews is easy. How does the team react to a negative review?

We’ve had a couple of really, really bad reviews. The websites responsible shall remain nameless in their shame, because we’ve had hundreds of extremely positive reviews, and it’s not that hard for us to disregard the bad reviews as simply the reviewer having a bad day and/or not getting it. The bad reviews that we’ve read tend to show a distinct lack of understanding of the sort of game they were playing – for example complaining that we don’t have the usual features you’d expect in an RTS. It’s like saying we’re not a very good first person shooter. We really don’t mind – we’ve linked to all the bad reviews on our website, and they always prove to be an interesting topic on the forums.

What’s the biggest complaint of Darwinia and is the team looking to address it with a patch?

We’ve had a lot of complains from players saying the controls were too hard to learn – the gestures etc. In hindsight, the demo of Darwinia isn’t very inviting – the player is sort of left on their own to figure things out. We’re working on a new demo right now that introduces a more friendly control mechanism, and a whole new level for new players to learn and sample the game.

What’s the best thing about working with a small team? Do you get more done?

Being branded as an “indie” developer must hold some pros and cons when it comes to the gaming public’s perception of what Introversion can do. What are those pros and cons?

Its partly good and partly bad. The small team means we just can’t attempt certain types of games. It also means we struggle to produce content – a number of reviews have said Darwinia is a little short, but it took us three years to produce a game with just 10 levels. Content production is the major time drain on most games, and we’d hoped to generate our levels randomly, but we ended up building each level by hand which took a very long time.

The main advantage is that we can do whatever we want! We own our company and all our IP, and we don’t have any publishers telling us what to make next. This gives us pretty much complete creative control over our games.

Darwinia’s soundtrack seems to be ripped right out of the late ‘80s or early ‘90s. What equipment was used in the creation of the soundtrack?

The music for Darwinia was composed almost entirely by a stunning musician called Trash80. His site can be found at www.trash80.net. We never got to meet him in person because he lives across the world from us, but I know he loves mixing Gameboys and old Atari computers into his music to create that distinctive sound.

Who wrote Darwinia’s story?

There were only two developers on Darwinia – myself (Chris Delay) and Andy Bainbridge. Everything you see in game came from the two of us working together. The only exceptions are the sound and music.

As a project, when did Darwinia finally all come together? (That moment when the team thought, “We can do this.”)

Very, very late! The creation of the squaddies was the breakthrough moment when we discovered we had a game that was actually fun to play, but that was 18 months into the project! We spent an incredible amount of time experimenting.

(September 7, 2005)