Interviews// Splash Damage Founder, Paul Wedgwood

SPOnG: What do you think of XNA (Microsoft's free development tools for indie devs)? You have a modding background...

Paul Wedgwood: It's weird... My only experience of XNA has been the occasional staff member that's come in and used it as part of their portfolio. As I understand it the problem is that you can't then use that to make something commercial, you then have to go away and write it and do it properly, so as a prototyping solution it's pretty successful.

We always loved working with engine content, but when we worked on things like a total conversion, we just had the source code. The great three, the id software centres, the software developer's kit, and the level design tools, and that's what we had to work with. So, you learned how to be a game developer while being a mod maker.

I think that back in the day when you had fourth generation languages for database software, everybody thought they could create their own databases for their companies. But the truth was there's a skill a database developer had in analysing your business, knowing what kind of data you needed to store, about bangs for bucks and data transference and back-ups and all kinds of other things. So, 4GL languages didn't become as popular as people thought they would.

There are elements of those in contemporary database development, but companies aren't developing their own databases. You still go out and have bespoke solutions and things. I think it's the same thing, really, with game development.

Simply having an easy route to prototyping doesn't necessarily mean you're going to have a better game or be a better game developer.


SPOnG: They've recently announced a pricing structure for the community games, so XNA users will be able to make a bit of cash from it.

Paul Wedgwood: I think that's really cool. I guess the problem I have with it – not with Microsoft, because there's very few things they do that are wrong – but in the '90s, the mod-making community was really just, make a mod and have fun doing it and giving it to your friends for free and that was all there was to it. There wasn't any real commercial motivation.

One of the things that worries me a bit about the indie game making scene is that quite often when you talk to these guys, they're expecting to be millionaires 12 months from now or 24 months from now.

The thing that got us started was that we had no interest in the money, we had no interest in business, we just wanted to make mods and have fun. We made them because we didn't have anything else to play at the time. We loved Quake 3 and we wanted to play something that was like Team Fortress on the Quake 3 engine.

So, that's the only reason we started. There were guys in the team who wanted portfolio pieces so they could get jobs in the game industry, but for me it wasn't until the second year that we said that 'we could give up our day jobs and do this instead!' And then we were just excited about the prospect of making games. We still weren't thinking about super cars or millions of pounds or any of that stuff, and I suppose with the indie game-making scene, when you talk to them, a lot of them are dreaming of having large companies and all this stuff.

But, they expect their first indie game to be a huge success, to be a breakout, and I think sometimes what they miss is that Geometry Wars... that game came from a really well-established studio – Bizarre Creations – who has a huge track record of triple-A success, a stunning development team, and were able to pick a small group of people who could work on something and kind of the mentoring and guidance of an amazing management team with loads of games industry experience. But, the stat that people pick is that, 'oh, it took eight guys four months'. But that really isn't how it works! And having a really good relationship with Microsoft helps as well.


SPOnG: Thanks for your time!