Continuing Xbox Live Arcade Week, we’ve been speaking to TwistedPixel’s Art Director David Leung about XBLA and The Maw.
First, and predictably, how did you get into making games?
I’ve been playing games since I can remember, starting on the Atari 2600 and constant visits to those things in the old days we called arcades and I never stopped. I was always into art as well and I went to art school at The Art Institute of Pittsburgh to learn the tools I needed and landed a job in the industry pretty much right out of graduation. I’d say though that I had a pretty easy time getting in and am very lucky for that, because this industry can be tough to get that first foot in the door unless you know people, which I did not.
Why choose XBLA as a platform to distribute your game?
I have to say the main reason we chose XBLA is that Microsoft are the ones who took the chance on a small unknown indie developer and saw the potential of The Maw at its very early concept and demo stage. It also made a lot of sense from our standpoint with the amount of budget and scope we were able to commit to developing The Maw. We knew we wanted to make a splash and at the time XBLA was still full of ports and remakes, but already offered a very large user base. So we saw the potential and the need in the XBLA market place for bigger and more original games.
What was the biggest challenge developing a game for XBLA?
XBLA itself was really great to develop for and it honestly didn’t really give us any hiccups I can think of. Most of the challenges we faced were grieves that we caused ourselves out of ambition, such as trying to create a full 3D action/platformer for download that was restricted by size and budget. Most of the games at that time were small low budget ports or remakes of classics. For The Maw, we had a fairly small budget and team of eight guys with no starting technology and a 150MB limit.
Did you have any problems with keeping The Maw’s file size down?
That was the most worrisome part of our preproduction and early design. We wanted a lot of animations, full 3D environments and high quality sounds and music, all of which take up a lot of space. Fortunately, we decided to build our engine around Granny 3D and all of our size restriction worries pretty much went away. With Granny we were able to squeeze 2 gigs of data down to under the 150MB limit. For the animation data we were seeing an 85:1 compression ratio with nearly no quality loss. I barely had to spend any time on a reduction pass of content to make it fit and was able to leave most of the art at the starting resolutions.
What is in store for the future?
We are hard at work on our next title, which is another original IP unrelated to The Maw. We are really excited about the game and think everyone will get a kick out of it when we can finally release some details.
Which games would you say you’ve been inspired by when creating The Maw?
When Josh Bear (CCO) and I were creating The Maw concept many years ago, Ico was the biggest inspiration for me. I really wanted to create characters in a game that people cared about and connected with like that game was able to do. It is something that I still don’t think we see enough in games. Other games that I’d say influenced The Maw in some way are A Boy and His Blob and Mario.
Why did you choose to not release The Maw on PSN?
Bringing The Maw to other platforms is something that we get requests from fans about quite a bit and is something we are willing to look into. We recently were able to bring The Maw to the PC via Steam, Greenhouse, and Direct2Drive. So who knows, you may see our little purple friend on more platforms down the road.
Thanks for taking the time to answer the questions.
No problem and thank you for taking an interest in Twisted Pixel Games and The Maw!
