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Mustard: Infinity Blade success didn't stall Shadow Complex 2
Chair creative director Donald Mustard was nice enough to sit for a few moments with us to talk Infinity Blade 2 so, naturally, we took advantage of his generosity to grill him about the long-discussed (and apparently "largely designed") Shadow Complex 2. We asked if the runaway success of Infinity Blade is what's kept the follow-up to the side-scrolling action-adventure off of Chair's radar. "No, I think that's a complete misnomer," Mustard said. "When we sat down to figure out what we wanted to do after Infinity Blade, and we started to wonder 'Do we want to do Infinity Blade 2?', it wasn't about 'Do we want to make more money?' it was about 'Do we have more to say in this genre?' 'Can we push this gameplay somewhere meaningful?' Those are the questions we ask ourselves. "Now that we've made the first Shadow Complex we kind of know what we're doing and we feel like we can really bring a lot to the Metroidvania genre and Shadow Complex franchise. We want it to be amazing, we want it to be perfect, and we want it to be delivered on the right platforms. It's really about finding the right opportunity for Shadow Complex, not that we've been diverted in any way. "Everyone on our team at Chair will be dead long before we run out of games we want to make. So we try to be very careful about where we spend our time." That's right, that's the answer: Mustard is choosy about projects because he's worried about his own mortality. We may not know when Shadow Complex 2 will arrive, but at least we know the source of the shadows: Donald Mustard's gloomy bummer clouds.
Chair on Infinity Blade 2 development crunch: It sucked
Chair co-founder Donald Mustard recently talked to Gamasutra about the trying circumstances under which Infinity Blade 2 was developed. The whole kit-and-caboodle was created in a six-month crunch; Mustard explained, "We don't look at that like that's a good thing at all. We only did it because we definitely, passionately wanted to get the game done, and we wanted a little more in there." Mustard added, exhausted, "I think in retrospect, having done it twice, that our development cycles are a little too short." He tiredly explained his team had to "death march kill ourselves" for the last two or three months, which is detrimental to the studio's longevity. "And so we definitely won't do that again," Mustard added, with great fatigue. "It's not worth the cost." We totally agree. Now, we're thinking Shadow Complex 2 by early April. Let's get cracking, okay?
Watch Chair pitch Infinity Blade 2 as an 'artistic experience'
Infinity Blade 2 studio Chair Entertainment say the project is much more than just a game, calling it an "artistic experience" in the latest dev diary. As such -- just to be safe -- we'll play the iOS title in a local museum when it arrives next week.
Why Epic Games hasn't made Shadow Complex 2 (but 'never say never')
When Shadow Complex was released in 2009, it received critical praise and became a commercial hit. After Epic Games announced that Chair's next game would instead be an iOS title named Infinity Blade, many were curious as to what had happened to the obligatory, post-success sequel. "The reviews were great, it was a record seller for a single-player game on the platform, but at the same time we've got this mobile gaming push that's coming in strong," Epic Games president Mike Capps explained this morning during his GDC Europe keynote. "And the big thing for me was that we were looking what the iPhone could do, and the games that were on iPhone, and we thought there was a huge gap, so we put our engine team on the problem, and that's where we came up with Infinity Blade," Capps said. "We were thinking about the sequel [to Shadow Complex], we were ready and 'Maybe we should start working on this,' and instead stopped everything and went and made Infinity Blade." Capps expanded on the possibility of a Shadow Complex sequel when I followed up with him after his presentation. "Never say never," he offered. Of course, when Chair head Donald Mustard answered the same question earlier this year, he said that such a sequel is "a question of when, not if."
What's in a Name: Chair Entertainment
Donald Mustard is the creative director and co-founder of Chair Entertainment, the Salt Lake City-based team responsible for 2009's Xbox Live Arcade hit Shadow Complex and last year's iOS hit Infinity Blade. He discussed the origin of his studio's during a panel at GDC: "The idea of 'Chair' comes from Plato's theory of forms. You guys all remember your Philosophy 101 class from university? Plato theorizes that everything exists in a perfect state, in some metaphysical state, and everything else is just an emulation of that metaphysical perfection. And he uses the example of a chair. "All of you are now sitting on a chair but if you look around through GDC, you'll see lots of different chairs that look different but all follow the same function. [Plato] postulates that all those chairs are all trying to become the perfect chair that is kind of out there, somewhere. "And we thought that was actually an applicable concept to game design. Because when we sit around and talk about games, or think about them in our head first, we think, 'Oh man it would be so awesome if this game was like this, or like this, or like that.' And then in our head, it's this perfect thing. And then we have to go through the process of actually making that game and it's never -- at least in my experience -- it's never as perfect as what we first envisioned in our heads. "So 'Chair' to us means the pursuit of perfection. It's trying to actually get to that ideal image that was first in our head when we thought about it." Infinity Blade is available -- and still being updated -- on the iTunes App Store as a universal app, compatible with both iPhone and iPad, for $5.99. Like this feature? Be sure to check out the What's In A Name Archives.
Infinity Blade update coming 'very, very soon,' Chair still has 'lots of content' to build
During the Q&A portion of today's Infinity Blade-focused GDC panel, Chair co-founder Donald Mustard was unsurprisingly asked about plans for future updates for the dev's iOS hit. "We have an update coming very, very soon," Mustard said, acknowledging that he wanted to get that question out of the way, "and it will add a ton of new content to the game and expand on some of the themes and story that you've already started to see." The game's first free update was released less than two weeks after the game's debut. The next question from the audience? Yup, asking what Chair is working on next. "We're working on something ... cool," Mustard teased. "Actually, right now we're very busy supporting Infinity Blade. That's actually one of the things that's a cool opportunity with these iOS games, is you have an opportunity to put out your game, and then to continue to support it easily." "It's so easy to make these content updates, and at least we've decided we're going to give our content away for free," he added. "So when you initially buy the game for $5.99 you know we're going to continue to give you content, so we still have lots of content we're building to support Infinity Blade." Of course, considering Infinity Blade -- the entire game! -- took the team just five months to make, and it was released nearly three months ago, we're guessing there's more going on at Chair's Salt Lake headquaters than just free update development, but we're heartened to hear it nevertheless.
Infinity Blade conceived as a Kinect game
If you've played iOS slasher Infinity Blade as much as us, you've probably spent some of your finger-callous massaging sessions thinking, "Why couldn't I be hacking up the God King in the completely callous-free world of Kinect?" Believe it or not, developer Chair Entertainment is way ahead of you ... and even ahead of itself, in a sense, according to co-founder Donald Mustard. "We always have some cool ideas on deck, and kind of the inception of Infinity Blade began as a discussion around: 'If we were going to make a Kinect title, what would we make? What would a Chair Kinect game look like?'," Mustard revealed. "That discussion happened, you know, a year and a half ago. We had this really cool design, and it's not that dissimilar from the game you're playing today; it's just been refined and adapted to the iOS screen, which honestly I think is where the design works the best." Mustard made clear that Infinity Blade isn't a Kinect game rejiggered for iOS so much as an idea sparked by Microsoft's device that found its home on iOS platforms. That said, Chair isn't closing any doors to Infinity Blade on Xbox 360. "Yeah," co-founder Geremy Mustard added, "if the Kinect really takes off over the holiday season, who knows?"
Ender's Game tabled by Chair
Chair Entertainment co-founder Donald Mustard has confirmed to Joystiq that the studio's Ender's Game project has been put on indefinite hold. Announced in early 2008, the downloadable game was to take place in the story's "Battle Room," a place where the protagonist partakes in simulation combat. "We have and had an amazing design for the Ender's Game game," Mustard assured, but "one of [parent company] Epic's primary objectives is to create original and unique franchises. I don't know that Ender's Game fits into that strategic objective anymore." "So, probably not," Mustard said of the project's completion. "Not from us." Still, Chair maintains a good relationship with Ender's Game author Orson Scott Card, who wrote a novel set in the developer's Shadow Complex universe. "If anyone decides they want to make it," Mustard added, "I have some ideas I'd love to talk to them about."
First Infinity Blade update next week, multiplayer coming soon
The problem with releasing Infinity Blade, arguably the best looking iOS game ever? As Chair Entertainment has discovered, it's keeping up with the stream of new content that iOS players have come to expect. "We're all very thrilled with how cool it looks, but the same amount of time it takes to make a high-res character for Gears is the same amount of time it takes to make one for Infinity Blade or to make these environments," Chair's Donald Mustard told Joystiq. "It takes time to make this stuff look awesome, and we want it to look awesome." Make no mistake, Chair has a long-term plan for its slash-em-up, but it's a plan the 12-member development team has to be judicious about executing. Though players may have to wait for a bit for some of the big updates (like the multiplayer mode), Chair is taking advantage of the game's early popularity and pushing the first add-on through the App Store door next week.
GDC: 'Designing Shadow Complex' (or: zig when they zag)
While Metroid director Yoshio Sakamoto may not have played Shadow Complex, the XBLA darling's creators definitely played Metroid. During a panel titled "Designing Shadow Complex," Chair Entertainment Creative Director Donald Mustard encouraged the audience of prospective downloadable game makers to embrace genre limitations. "So, genre is one of your limitations because you aren't just competing against other games that are released in the downloadable space," Mustard said, pacing across the stage. "You really are competing against Gears of War, Mass Effect 2, Uncharted 2. That is the real competition and you need to find a way to differentiate yourself from those kinds of games. And that is an awesome opportunity." For Mustard, that meant moving "orthogonally" from what the "big $60 retail games" are doing. Mustard said, "For us, what that ultimately meant is target an old and abandoned genre. Which to us was kind of this Metroidvania side scroller adventure genre that had been abandoned. No one was making games in this genre. And we said, 'What if we took that genre and fused that with some of the modern sensibilities that had come out; some of the modern ideas of AI and physics and graphics? That would be a really cool combination.'
