Among the exhibitors at GameCity this year were winners of Dare To Be Digital 2010, Angry Mango. They were there with a preview build of their Windows Phone 7 puzzle platformer, Mush. I caught up with Programmer Ahmed Zaman and Lead Artist Kate Killick for a chat:

DIYgamer: You won the Dare To Be Digital contest up in Dundee. What have you been up to since then?

Zaman: Since then we’ve just been making the game shinier, making sure there’s a lot more elements of the game that the player will be able to interact with. We’ve added a new emotion: Essentially a new mechanic. We’ve been building lots of levels, and lots of bug testing.

Killick: And we’ve done a lot of Xbox Live integration

Zaman: Which was exciting, because we approached by Microsoft about making it Live, which, to be honest, we were the first student game to be on Xbox Live for Windows Phone, that was definitely very exciting. Hopefully the game should be finished within the next month, and released soon after that.

DIYgamer: So were you set on professional game careers before the win at Dare?

Killick: I was definitely planning to go into games after my degree, the thing about the course at Newport, where we’ve been studying, is that it’s very much geared toward independent development, so the more I went through the course, the more I started thinking that I really wanted to be producing independent games. I guess Dare To Be Digital kind of made that seems like a really realistic opportunity, whereas before that it seemed like a bit of a fantasy.

Zaman: Very similar, I’ll back Kate on this. The second year, we were working collaboratively, and I was on the programming course, and us and the design course worked together on this miss mash of a project that we made up. Which was cool, but it really did show to me that indie is possible. Before then, I was planning to hopefully finish my degree and then hit some massive company. That’s kind of the dream you have when you first sit in class in year one, and then you sort meet the artist, and you make a little team. That’s what happened when we applied for Dare, we were a four man and a woman team.

Killick: I had definitely expected to have to work a few years doing any job I could get in game to maybe work up to get an opportunity to do independent development. It’s been a lot more than I expected.

DIYgamer: I imagine being part of a small team, you get to have a lot of influence on the whole of the game.

Killick: I guess through university I’ve really gotten used to working in that way, being in a small team, and being able to implement the things that you want, and direct the thing together. Everyone has input on the design in the team. It’s hard to imagine now, not having some much input on the design, maybe in a bigger team.

Zaman: And you can definitely see the character in the levels. The levels that Kate’s designed, I can totally see “this is what she likes”, and the way she wants to build this level. Whereas the other artist, there’s very much a different style that you can see as well.

DIYgamer: You could spot them out of a line up?

Zaman: Yeah. That kind of thing, even the programmers are able to pick out this detail that shows the level of input all of us have had on the design.

DIYgamer: So the Windows Phone 7 is a relatively new platform, and you’re the first student team to be picked up by Microsoft. Have there been any unexpected challenges?

Zaman: On the technical side, there were a lot of challenges. I think the least challenging thing was that we were working on XNA, and we’ve used that throughout our university. In that sense it was quite a good experience, and we knew how to deal with rendering, and this and that. The physics engine we were using works on PC, Xbox and Windows Phone. Luckily enough even Zune, a super weak device. The main challenge was that Microsoft released it, and there are certain things you have to accommodate for on the phone, soon after they released the Mango build, and it got a bit more complicated. But these things are only natural in the development process.

Killick: I think that there’s been a lot of challenges for us as students, on the business side. It’s not something that our university or other people can give you that much advice one. Not many people have gone through this as a student, and we don’t exactly have a legal team or anything, it’s just us working through everything, and make sure we understand the process.

Zaman: It was very much a team effort. We wanted to work together to make sure this was a group effort. There were ups and downs, but it was a great opportunity to work with talented people. It’s something that I definitely dreamed about.

DIYgamer: What are your plans for after release, have you got any ambitions for a next project yet?

Killick: It’s a little bit up in the air still. We were hoping that we’ve have more of an idea by now, because of course, having graduated, and needing some sort of income. I’ve started job applications, but it’s difficult because we’re geographically placed differently as a team now, one of our other programmers has gone off to do an MSC, so we’re down a member as well. We were only a team with the aim of doing this one project, so we’ll have to finish it, then evaluate it then.

Zaman: We’ve talked about it vaguely, but I think everyone’s been really busy, naturally.

DIYgamer: Life gets in the way sometimes.

Zaman: Pretty much. We didn’t have much time to talk about it, so maybe when Mush is done.

DIYgamer: So you’ve not been put off indie development by any of your challenges?

Zaman: No, if anything, I’ve been more interested in indie or small team development. But I definitely want to be working in a small team where you can have input on art direction of whatever. The big challenge is that you have to actually run a studio.

Killick: I think that one of the challenges, and maybe one of the things I have learnt for the mistakes we’ve made with Much is the pressure of working as a small team. There’s so much responsibility to get everything done, but you can never ignore something that’s wrong with the game, if you know you will have to fix it. Especially for us, because we’ve had such a hectic year finishing our degrees and working on it, I would really like to get a better balance of work hour and leisure hours.

Zaman: That’s it. We’ve been crunching for the entire year. Whether it’s just Much, Uni work, dissertation. It’s just been constant pressure.

DIYgamer: I hope you take a nice break once you’ve finished it.

Zaman: GameCity is a nice break, actually.

Here’s an old promo trailer they did for Dare:

Pretty, isn’t it?

[Angry Mango]