Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Introversion’s Prison Architect is the mysterious tumour that ate away at Subversion. Wait, that’s a horrible thing to say! Let me get my Men In Black Mind Eraser thing and we’ll pretend I never said – *flash* [Editor's Note - at this point Craig accidentally flashed his own memories. He doesn't know who he is, so we've told him he's Oor Wullie]. Crivens! Thuy sais it’s oot fur a’body aroond September, if yer up for contributin’ tae tha alphu.
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What a strange headline that is. What it means is this: Introversion’s forthcoming procedurally-generated espionage game, Subversion, was shown at London-based Indie convention World Of Love earlier this year. It was filmed, via the magic of wobblecam, and uploaded for the internet. That means you can watch Chris Delay play through one of the levels, and see polygonal Kieron Gillen and Eskil Steenberg rob a bank, using their charm and their tech. As in games, so in life…

Go, watch!
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I didn’t notice my Eurogamer interview with Chris Delay at Introversion had been published, until the weekend. It is, strictly speaking, 360-related, in talking about their open-development process with Darwinia+ for Live Arcade. They’re basically showing a load of internal documents and papers from interactions with Microsoft. To quote Chris: “They suggested a few guidelines and we went ahead and pretty quickly stepped way over them and started publishing confidential reports with classified ‘Do Not Publish Outside Microsoft’ written on them”. There’s a lot about Introversion more generally as a company too. The interview was done the day after Chris had posted the 2008 in hindsight piece noting how close Introversion had come to closing and we talk a lot about that and the possibility of a “zombie Introversion”. Which would be sad, in many ways. Go read.

I’m pretty chuffed with this enormous Chris Delay interview over on Offworld. It’s part of a series of wide-ranging chats I’ve been having with my favourite developers. Sample text:

Rossignol: You’re making programmer art an art style. You’re vindicating that approach: artists don’t have to be there to make games look good.

CD: There’s definitely a look and style to our videogames. I love sharp, vectorised lines, and work towards that. Look at the Darwinians, they’re a classic piece of programmer art that got promoted into the lead character of the game. They’re now our company logo too – what kind of logo summarised our design philosophy?

Go read.