Infinite State Games: you don't need a big budget for big success

the company i work at is infinite state games i'm the creative director uh we've been going in our current forum since 2008 uh there's two of us and um we're very much winging it from daytona okay so what sort of platforms are you working what kind of games are you making we started working on ios platforms we've got three games out on ios and we recently started working with sony so we're starting to bring some games to vita platform now starting with um again called avoid droids which we're making which is coming out at the end of may and then after that we're going to try and bring one of our ios games through tourists to vita as well but we're going to rename that mr fruits but okay yeah so ios and vita okay so portable platforms that's perfect for us um uh the one of the things i i like about both the games in terms of like aesthetic it definitely looks like you've got like a claymation aesthetic for well like a kind of created homemade kind of kind of aesthetic well

that came about out of necessity rather than sort of a conscious decision being that at the time we didn't have any artists right and it's a nightmare unless you want to like do coder art or do pixel art um which everyone's getting a bit sick of yeah uh you've got to try something new and it's so much easier to make a little model out of clay and take a photograph of it than it is to draw so and also like how long did that take us like a day all the characters and all the level stuff so so you might so the the this sort of like homespun um aesthetic comes from uh a necessity rather than necessarily like a first choice yeah absolutely and so there is this necessity um and it comes from maybe not necessarily having like a massive budget to make a game so how so obviously that's an example of how um an indie game developer can kind of get around that particular sort of technical hurdle let's say yeah yeah so is that what the indie games scene to

you is about is it is is there is there a lot of in your day-to-day work is there a lot of that kind of thing i think i think among the genuine um independents that aren't successful money-wise yeah there's an awful lot of make do and and mend there's an awful lot of uh you scratch my back and i'll give you my graphics engine there's an awful lot of yeah you know um that's a really nice sound man can i nick it you know there's a there's a lot of of helping each other and there's a lot of um making use of a lot of free stuff and there's a lot of sharing information and resources between companies that i don't think you'd get in when certainly in my experience into a play you don't get which is really nice yeah it's a little bit communisty i mean you know so there is this there is this sort of like spirit of sharing amongst like certainly a large portion of indie game developers that i've talked to that kind of thing what do you feel obviously there's the monetary benefit of not necessarily having to pay a whole bunch of stuff but

what is are there any other benefits are there any sort of creative benefits of talking with one another or is it simply well absolutely i mean like most most of the indie developers that we uh are friendly with and how we all kind of like similar games and we all tend to share similar ethoses for what what makes a game fun uh our games are all massively different but because of that huge melting pot of unbridled creativity that isn't necessarily led by i've gotta shift units yeah um there's some great ideas and some inspiring ideas you know and we're all sort of instantly inspired by each other and it's so easy to say guys uh i've done this stick it on your dev kit have a go you know but you couldn't let's say you're working for a triple a company you couldn't send over a copy of fifa to the the mass effect people and go what do you think of this cross yeah yeah like ball physics yeah yeah yeah you can't but but we can i can suddenly

either go on uh we'll make brandon's forget me not and he can they can have a go on avoid droid and say i'm not sure about mission eight so so there's um so we've talked about art um i think you're sort of like touching there on like sort of crowd source testing that kind of thing and sound and that sort of thing like what else what you know what else can you can you get from these things or do you find like crowd source testing actually works out well yeah crowdsource testing's worked out great for us i mean we've taken full advantage of that um obviously we can't afford focus groups we can't afford to get a load of people in with a you know a greg's platter for the afternoon so um we do our testing for a couple of ways we invite friends around to have a go write down notes not friends that necessarily like games you know like mums you know sisters uh people's friends mums a lot of people from work get dragged in i think the most effective and

interesting one we did was um we went to dare and we went to that one in cardiff games city and we took a build of a uh avoid droid along to that and we had a number of tweakies so we had like an enemy speed tweaky and a sensitivity tweaking because the void droid is uh tilt control yeah so it's absolutely relying on that control scheme being perfect and not i would like it a bit more like we had to nail it so we had a couple of these sliders and we just get everyone on mess up the sliders watch them mess up and then tweak it so it's better and then go is that better to make it tweak it is that better just like you know we go to the opticians number one number two yeah and uh we did that again and again and again and again and again and uh put more together got the average tested it out yes bang on yeah fantastic thank you to the crowd sources