This is me, standing on stage, 3rd from the right at the 2006 IGF awards in San Jose, with my fellow Directors at Introversion.  This is the greatest moment of my life.  It doesn’t get any better than this.  Five thousand gamers are cheering as we throw foam Darwinians into the audience, while dressed in sharp tuxedos rented less than an hour earlier.  Our second game “Darwinia” has just won the IGF Seamus McNally Grand Prize, along with awards for Technical Excellence and Visual Art, netting us huge kudos and $25,000 in prize money.  Our resident Alpha-Male Managing Director Mark Morris takes the microphone, says thank you, then tells the audience that despite being broke for an entire year, we didn’t take any money from publishers because we didn’t want publishers f***ing up our game.  The resulting audience cheer seems to last forever, and I have never felt like I did in that moment.  This must be what rock stars feel like.

For many people, Darwinia is the definitive Introversion Game.  Three years in the making with a development cycle wildly out of control, Darwinia was a project that so thoroughly bankrupted our company during its development that the entire team went without money for a whole year, racking up massive personal debts in the process.  It also sold very poorly on release.  However it is also a hugely imaginative and creative piece of work, critically acclaimed on launch with high review scores across the board, and picking up numerous awards in the process.  It’s the game that brought Introversion to the attention of the worldwide games media, and its central character – the 2d Darwinian sprite lost in a complex and dangerous 3d world – is so iconic we ended up using his 32x32 pixel image as our company logo.  The IGF win in 2006 was the turning point for our company, the moment we transitioned from a bedroom indie to a professional games company, and it led directly to the Valve Steam version (which finally brought Darwinia its audience and saved our cashflow) and the partnership with Microsoft, which will (eventually) spawn Darwinia+ for the Xbox360. 

So just how did we get there?

The genesis of Darwinia

Rewind four years to 2002 – I was nine months into my first serious job in the games industry, working as a programmer at a UK game studio.  Truth be told, I was already pretty sick of it – my worst fears about the banality of game development were coming true, and my assigned project was a classic case of cash-in handle-turning pulp.  I’d met a like-minded programmer called Andy Bainbridge and we decided we’d work on a game project in our spare time. That project was called Future War, and it was designed to be a multiplayer wargame with the biggest armies ever seen – we were aiming for 100,000 troops on a single battlefield. 

We can’t take credit for the initial idea – that goes to the Indie Game Jam.  Founded in 2002, the IGJ was a masterclass in rapid prototype development.  They would meet once a year in California for just a few days, during which time they’d produce numerous game prototypes that demonstrated and explored one concept.  The first IGJ involved 14 game developers and was based around a single concept – massive numbers of sprites on screen at once.  They were exploiting the polygon pushing power of modern graphics cards – which can easily throw around millions of polygons per second without slowing down.  Rather than using those polygons for 3d geometry and shapes, they attached sprites to every one of those polygons - giving them millions of sprites per second, every one of which represented a single character in the world.  During just four days of work they produced twelve games using this technology.  Once the sessions were over they published all the games they’d made, and that’s when these guys first came to my attention.  I loved the concept of a massive sprite army, and I loved the concept of controlling enormous battles from on high.  Together with Andy Bainbridge we looked at all the prototypes, thought about a few ideas about how you’d control those huge armies, and started work on the Future War project.

The first six months

For around six months we’d come home from our day jobs and spend our evenings experimenting with whatever seemed interesting.  We put 10,000 Doom sprites onto a landscape and had them roaming around at random.  Inspired by the Spectrum classic “Chaos”, we gave players the ability to summon armies through vast portals, and then throw those armies at each other.  We used whatever placeholder sprites and graphics we could get our hands on, often taking graphics from games like Doom and reusing them to represent our armies.  We were searching for a style of game to create – we knew it would involve big armies, but what exactly would you, the player, do with those armies, and how would you control them?  At first it was great fun experimenting, but this central issue – how do you control 100,000 troops – rapidly became our biggest problem, and one that we wouldn’t solve for a long time.

In one of our many prototypes, the player took control of a jetpack powered individual who hovered around the landscape, directly controlled by the mouse.  You could “grab” large numbers of sprites and then issue orders to them as a group.  Our concept was that you’d control the battle by flying over the troops you wanted to control, and you’d navigate the map as a person, rather than a disembodied rts-style camera. 

We also replaced the obviously copyrighted Doom sprites with our own placeholder – a simple 32x32 chunky sprite which we called the Laser Trooper, seen in the above screenshot in yellow squares.  We had no idea at the time that this quick scribble made in a few minutes in paint shop pro would become the central character of our game, and would be such an iconic graphic that we’d eventually employ him as our company mascot.

Meanwhile, my day job at that Uk Games studio was going downhill rapidly, and I was using up all of my emotional effort on the FutureWar project in the evening.  During the day I wandered around the company office in a half-asleep daze, finding it quite difficult to really care about what I was supposed to be working on.  Inevitably I was fired due to what I can only summarise as extreme laziness on my part.  The bosses had figured out that my heart was no longer in it, and decided it was time for us to part company.  And so ended my time in the commercial games industry – the final step I’d never been courageous enough to take myself had been taken for me.  I’ve never looked back, and it forced me to go fulltime with Introversion and commit everything I had to our own company.  Finally I would be able to work full-time on finishing Darwinia, but as my next blog will show we were only just at the beginning.