Bryant Jones, Bryan Clarke, Salvia Dhall, Dave Marhal, and Karin Schmidlin created something rather special. WOMP! takes the one-button gaming premise and adds a collaborative multiplayer component. Players work together to navigate a flying contraption through different levels, with each person responsible for a different part of the machine.

This unique multiplayer experience was so attractive to the Canadian Video Game Awards judges that they chose it as the Best Student Game. Having members from thatgamecompany and Silicon Sisters on the students’ advisory board certainly couldn’t have hurt the game’s development, either!

Given such an accolade and support, the WOMP! developers seemed to be a interesting source to learn from, with regards to their development cycle and the Canadian Game Conference (CGC) experiences. In this interview, the developers also talk about how at the CGC event it was hard to find Canadian developers thinking in ways that will push the industry in new directions.

However, Team WOMP! offers collectively opinions on how the industry should do so. They explain how they met WOMP!’s goal to be “the second best thing gamers can do on a sofa,” integrating and encouraging face-to-face conversations in the gameplay. This ultimately ties into the team’s philosophy of there being an opportunity in the gaming industry to exploit this kind of interaction, as opposed to the current dominant online play model.

What gaming events have you attended before, and how did CGC compare to them?

Last year we attended GDC down in San Francisco where we demoed WOMP! at our school’s booth in the Expo Hall. That was a positive experience for us, specifically the networking opportunities it created. A few of us also attended both the Game Design Expo and GDC Canada held here in Vancouver. The CGC felt much more intimate in comparison. What’s great about the Canadian community is the level of openness and honesty. At the same time, the dialogue was kept at a very high level. It’s hard to find Canadian developers thinking in ways that will push the industry in new directions.

Given that, care to suggest new ways to push the industry?

There are a number of frontiers in game design waiting to be explored. We’ve taken the social route. We’re exploring how we can create games that become both hobbies and social activities. When designing, we imagine a particular style of interaction we want to create between people (laughter, conversation, eye contact, and physical contact). Then we create mechanics that elicit those interactions. There’s definitely room for others to take this philosophy and apply it to the world of social games, for example. The bigger point, though, is to stop worrying about the industry’s hazy future and instead start building guide posts for other developers to follow. One technique that has worked well for us is building small paper prototypes under an 18 minute time constraint. Repeating that exercise over and over again always seems to push ourselves creatively.

What do you say is unique about your game?

Our greatest success is that we built a multiplayer game for a general audience — something a grandma could play with her grandchildren, or a couple could play on a first date. Our tagline throughout development was, “The second best thing you can do on a sofa.” We tried to capture what’s so special about sitting next to your friends and family on the sofa in the living room. Conversations are part of the gameplay; the play experience is highly sensitive to the personalities within the group. And the game is played with only a single button.

Your goal within the game is to collectively move a single avatar through an obstacle course. One player controls the acceleration, another player controls the steering, a third player controls the brakes, etc. It’s easy to imagine the conversations that emerge from those dynamics.

In the end our game truly did appeal to all age groups and player types we tested with. We attribute a large part of that success to our diverse team makeup; our target audience was reflected in our team. Three of us are hardcore gaming enthusiasts (all guys), two of us are non-gamers (both female), and our ages range from the early twenties to mid-forties.

You were in a school program, right? How did your school or you coordinate having non-gamers in your team?

Our last semester of school allowed us to work on our own projects. However, to do so, we needed to create our own team, pitch the idea to the school and get approval. Team formation was quite organic. All of us wanted to create a fun playable game at the end of the semester, and we naturally gravitated to each other to form our current team. It was important for us to have a wide range of perspectives while sharing the same goal.

With conversation being a key to gameplay, have you considered using any voice recognition technology, or thought about how that could further your development mission in a future title?

The premise of WOMP! was to re-create that board game feeling — that sense of sitting around the kitchen table with your friends and having a good time. Using voice recognition technology would likely get in the way of the conversations that would otherwise happen naturally.

What tools/software did you use to create your game?

On the art side, we used a combination of Illustrator and Photoshop. We worked on Wacom’s wonderful interactive pen tablets, the Cintiq UX21. For tech, we used the Torque X engine. That allowed us to get a prototype up and running within the first few days of development. It was a little tricky getting the game running on the Xbox, and the engine definitely wasn’t polished enough to create a professional product with. But for a student project it worked well enough. We wouldn’t have seen the same level of success without it.

What lessons/tricks did you learn while creating your game?

Don’t waste any time on upfront design documentation or scheduling. Our first and only goal when starting the project was to get a prototype up and running on screen. After that, we focused our efforts on playtesting and iterating to bring out the fun in our game.

We also found it helpful to build and maintain an advisory board throughout development. It helped to fill the gaps in our team makeup.

Additionally, we made a conscious effort to share our ideas with everyone; we didn’t hide behind any NDAs. We discovered that everybody was more than willing to share ideas and offer feedback in return. Many people went out of their way to help us.

One last point: we realized that creating a good game is not enough in today’s market. Finding funding, marketing, and distribution are all realities we need to take into account during development.

You mentioned an advisory board. What did it do specifically for your team?

Both, Tom Frisina (thatgamecompany, former VP of EA partners) and Brenda Gershkovich (Silicon Sister, former COO Deep Fried Entertainment) are veterans in the industry. Aside from general encouragement, Tom and Brenda were instrumental when it came to preparing a budget and pitch for our presentation to Microsoft Game Studios. Both Tom and Brenda helped us understand the business of making games when we were focused more on the art of making them.

What did you learn while attending CGC?

The big takeaway was that no one has any idea where the industry is headed. But that opens up a huge opportunity to shape the future by creating new styles of play. Regardless of what direction the industry takes, we believe that any game that brings people together and fosters social interaction can be a success. People like people.

What are your future projects?

After finishing our Master’s in the Spring of 2010, we were the lucky recipients of a small development grant from Microsoft Game Studios under the guidance of Don Mattrick. That gave us another few months to polish the game, but soon we needed to look for full-time employment. Currently all 5 of us work on other projects. Dave is a Lead Level Designer on X-Men Destiny at Silicon Knights. Salvia and Bryant are building a start-up, funded by the Canada Media Fund, focused on bringing digital games into playground environments. Karin took a job as a Multimedia Manager at Allegra Marketing. And Bryan works at Qwick Media as a front end Flash programmer. But we’re still exploring opportunities to bring WOMP! to a wider audience.

When can players try out WOMP!?

WOMP! was built as a prototype for a student project. Our time spent working on it was focused more on exploring the concept rather than building a commercial product. With that said, we would love to get WOMP! in the hands of as many people as possible. The grant we received from Microsoft helped us along that path, but it only took us so far. We’re exploring new funding opportunities, though!

The indie world is listening: what’s on your mind?

The indie community has the freedom to push the boundaries of what games are and what they can become. However, the products and services that win are those that open up new channels for socialization — ones that bring people together and create shared experiences. We think there’s a big opportunity surrounding games that encourage face-to-face communication (as opposed to staring at a screen the whole time), physical contact, and general conversation.

Also, make gameplay a message.

[Thanks to the developers of WOMP! for contributing to this interview. Read more about WOMP! here]