We’re going to jump right into the second segment of my awesome talk with this amazing dude pictured above: Colin Northway. If you missed the first part of the Incredipede interview, go digest every yummy murmured morsel Colin said there first. Then come back and join in the fun!

In part two, I particularly LOVE how Colin tells it like it is when it comes to people needing to get “better” at being excited– not just at conferences, but everywhere. I also love hearing about Petri Purho’s “rule of ten” in effect, and the bittersweet nine prototypes that had to die so that Incredipede could be born.

DIY: To clarify from earlier, there will be no procreating with the life-like Quozzles in Incredipede?

Colin: Nope. Evolution is a common thread in other games I’ve tried to design but not in this one. That was one of the big “aha” moments in the game’s design actually. Originally you were playing as “life”. Every level you took evolution’s hand and made a new species to populate a specific niche. As you played you would populate a garden with more and more creatures eventually creating a functioning ecosystem.

That idea died when the nervous system went away. There’s really only so much you can fit into one game and the creature creating took center stage pretty quickly. It’s nice to have such rich material for a potential sequel though.

DIY: Do you find that some games don’t live up to their potential because they have a predetermined finish line? I imagine this could be the case with sequels especially?

Colin: I think a lot of games with budgets and many people working on them have set finish lines. This makes perfect sense when you’re gambling people’s mortgages on the game. I think that makes development easier but it’s not how you get new interesting games.

Unfortunately for new and interesting games Petri Purho’s [Crayon Physics Deluxe developer] “rule of ten” applies. That is, for every ten games you start only one will be good.

It took me two years to get through my ten and find Incredipede.

DIY: So the other 9 are dead dead or parts of them are in Incredipede?

Colin: I spent six months on a game called Clutter. I playtested it and got a lot of feedback from other devs. It even has some art (I can get you a screenshot if you want) In the end I just couldn’t make it go. And in Honduras I abandoned it. Parts of it have made it into Incredipede but there were a lot of good ideas that had to be left behind.

DIY: So, we saw your awesome talk at SOWN. Anything you want to add or share about your experience at SOWN?

Colin: SOWN was an amazing event. For me the best part of indie events like this is the people. There’s such a rich feeling of camaraderie whenever indies get together. Interesting games tend to be made by interesting people and just sitting down and having a beer with that group was inspiring.

I’ve always wished games were a thing you could preform live, like music, but I think SOWN is going to be as close to that as I ever get.

DIY: Any improvements to the SOWN event itself or pavilion you’d suggest?

Colin: I think if anything needs to change it’s us rather than them. The games that were shown at SOWN this year were _fantastic_. Some of them were truly mind-blowing. Yet a lot of the presenters didn’t seem that excited about them. For some reason the kind of people that write games aren’t the kind of people that will get up in front of a crowd
and jump up and down with excitement.

So while they have this amazing game happening behind them they talk about it in this very reserved, intellectual way. We need to get better at being excited. This isn’t just true for SOWN, this is true everywhere.

DIY: Other than trial and error, what skills can people employ to make the “right” creatures?

Colin: Mix and Match. I’ve been reading a lot about the human brain and human problem solving. I even set up some experiments at a collaborative indie workspace in San Francisco. It seems like a lot of problem solving comes down to metaphor. Realizing suddenly that your problem is just like the problem of getting ketchup out of a bottle, or the problem of finding the perfect birthday gift.

So my aim is to provide people with some simple building blocks. “This is one way to get from a to b”. “This is one way to reach a high place”. Then when they have to walk from a to b to reach a high place they aren’t totally in the dark, they have some ideas to build on. Of course if you want to be dropped into the deep end I want to let you do that too. After all, that is how I learned to play it.

DIY: In your blog you said you are “vehemently anti-cloning”?

Colin: Yes! It took me two years of hard work to find Incredipede. It took six months of hard work to make the game fun. It’s not like great games just appear in your head one day fully formed. It might seem that way to outsiders but that isn’t how it works and it’s not ok for some cloner to come along and steal all that hard work.

DIY: You mentioned Andy Moore helped spread the word of Fantastic Contraption. At what size do indies need an “Andy Moore” and what functions does he serve?

Colin: Andy Moore was Fantastic Contraption’s only employee. He did community management, which meant answering emails and moderating/interacting with the forum. He was and is really great at that job. But unfortunately for me he’s gone on to making his own games. He made the wildly popular Steambirds series and is now going back into prototyping mode to bring us some more great and original games.

So my loss of a community manager is a net gain to the world because we get these new cool games that he makes. It does leave me kind of caught out in the spotlight though. People paying attention to your game is very important. Too many great games don’t get the audience they deserve because the creator isn’t willing to engage with the public. But engaging with the public is a scary thing. Scary enough that I ran screaming from it when Fantastic Contraption was released.

This time around I’m determined to get myself out there and engage myself publicly. Just go easy on me internet, go easy!

[I hope our discussion was easy enough on you Colin! Of course, I look to my peers in the fields of journalism, development and the great gray area between to help spread the word of Incredipede! Thanks so much for the interview, and I look forward to sharing soon what the wife, Sarah, has cooking up at Northway Games!]

I spotted Andy Moore of Radial Games hanging around the awesome Winnitron 1000 indie arcade cabinet on the floor of GDC 2011. It had been a while since I (by means of Dejobaan Games) spoke with Andy at the virtual water cooler, so I was eager to catch up.

Before GDC, he excitedly took part in an indie giving event where 60 devs came out on the weekend and refurbished three homeless shelters. Andy was equally excited about all of the projects he is working on. He’s developing a multiplayer SteamBirds (with pilots!) and is about to roll out dedicated forums for the SteamBirds community. Finally, gamers should keep their “eyes peeled” for his upcoming potato game.

DIYgamer: What are you working on?

Andy Moore: SteamBirds multiplayer is currently in development, and a beta will be open to the public in the summer. Our dedicated Steambirds forum is getting ready to open up. If I need 100 players to do a stress test on SteamBirds, the forum will be the first place to go for testers.

Will there be a cap to the amount of players?

I’m trying to make it cap-less. It’s basically limited by the rendering engine. I may put a cap on for performance reasons.

Will this be an add-on of the current SteamBirds?

This will be another game. If you have a save file from the first or second game with planes unlocked, that save will unlock special content in the new multiplayer game. We want to reward the old players. It costs $15.00 to unlock all the planes in Survival, so I ideally want to reward $15.00 of content in the multiplayer version.

What new content will players see?

There will be different missions such as bombing missions. We will develop the game over time. The first version will look similar to the current game. We will introduce pilots, I think. You’ll have a pilot in your plane, plane might be good at something else. So it’s a combination of two skills.

The plane can die. The planes have permadeath, but your pilot can parachute to safety. Pilots are what you level up; planes are consumable. There will be free planes available, as I always want the game to be accessible to everyone.

I’m hoping to have very little advertising this time around. Having people around in the game is a benefit because it provides opponents for everyone else. We need fodder!

Is there any way to deal damage to the players themselves?

No, but I really like the idea of permadeath. I love permadeath games, but I know it’s really dangerous territory. People don’t want to lose everything, so I like that we have half and half.

You can develop a roster of pilots. One of them might be shot down, and he’ll have to walk back home. It might take him a while to walk back, so you can’t use him again for a day or two. There’s a time penalty, but you get him back. You can then assign him a new plane or build him a new one out of a stockpile of scrap metal.

It sounds like you have a great amount of design objectives to experiment with.

Well, we’ve actually done all the experiments with the two online versions of the games, the Android version of the game (which is different) and the different iOS game. We took the best of all four versions and used that for the template of the multiplayer.

What platforms will it release on?

It will be out on all platforms. When we won the Indie Pub Game of the Year award, it came with an XBLA contract, so might as well… I want an Android person to be able to play against and iOS person. I want them to all tie in.

I’m thinking of a Words with Friends kind of play style, where you have seven things going on at once. When it’s your turn, you just hop in. It’s very early in development, but it won’t take long to make.

When can we expect to play it?

I’m thinking, by early May we’ll have our internal builds up. Then, once we get the stress tests going, it’ll be about a month or two. SteamBirds and SteamBirds Survival each took a month, so I’m not expecting this to be a six month project.

Are you planning on traveling cross country again on your van?

No, I spent four months doing that.

Did it teach you about anything or inspire you to make a game?

I went to aviation museums, so it’s been a little bit of inspiration. But not a whole lot because I’m a pilot. But I did get inspired to make a few other games.

I stopped at a potato farm on the east coast of Canada, and I went to two potato museums. I kind of went to them as a joke, but it was so interesting: how in-depth they were with slicing the potatoes, all the systems they have. I was like, “Hey, this is kind of like a Potato Tycoon.,” so I started drafting it up.

Where would you put the game?

I’m thinking something such as Big Fish. That’s the kind of market that goes well with those kind of things.

[Thanks for the interview, Andy! Watch his blog for more updates.]