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I read that Darwinia was designed with multiplayer support in the engine, but it was just a single player game. We don’t have the big budget to advertise in the conventional sense, and when we can get word of mouth support, that ends up really helping. We’re still a small company, you know, now we’re around 7 full-time employees. You were saying about word of mouth, and how valuable that is. That’s one thing that helped us hugely, because we had the Linux port. Do you think by overlooking the Linux community, other developers are loosing out on revenue and word of mouth advertising? Linux users as a whole are more vocal and have more mind share with other “less techie” individuals. It’s still worthwhile doing Linux ports, we just have to focus on getting the game out first. Then maybe 15% are Mac, then around 2 or 3% is Linux. The lions share comes from the Windows users. When you look at the numbers, Linux users do contribute to sales.
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We wont try for a simultaneous Linux release, because it’s hard enough to just to get the PC and the Mac version working together.
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We’re going to try for a simultaneous Windows and Mac OS release. We’ll be bringing it to multiple platforms. So right now what my role at Introversion is busy developing Multiwinia. Some games are 5 minutes, some are 15 minute long games. The games probably last about 10 minutes on average. It has a similar style of networking architecture to Defcon. It will have maybe up to four players will be able to play over the internet. Multiwinia is where you get to have some full-scale battles between teams of Darwinians. What I am doing now – my role has shifted – We are now working on Multiwinia, which is the successor to Darwinia, the multiplayer version if you like.
So we did that for MacOS as well, we had help from fans for the
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Porting to Mac OS X is very similar for many of the issues with porting to Linux, especially when you use libraries like SDL. They are remarkably similar to the original games. Later on when we did Darwinia, we actually did that in-house.
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Ambrosia Software is our partner for the Macintosh, and for Uplink they independently ported it to the Mac. I did the same thing for Darwinia, but for Defcon we got some help from fans to port it to Linux, while I oversaw the operation. And I said “Why certainly, of course.” At the time I was using Linux as my main desktop, and was full-time hacking away at Linux. He said to me, Johhny can you help with a Linux port. Not to say that Linux users are criminals, it’s a particular kind of puzzle solving in Uplink, and it’s similar to things people do in Linux anyways. People who enjoy Linux might enjoy a hacking game. Thus Introversion was born.Īnd then they thought that Uplink might have a Linux market. Then Mark and Tom said “Chris, we think you should sell Uplink,” and they did. He makes the game in Windows, this is how it happened for Uplink. Traditionally what happens is Chris comes up with some great game ideas, and he’s a pretty good coder so he gets down to it.
What I started doing at Introversion was looking after the ports. Which is why at the end of my education, I joined later. What happened is Mark, Tom and Chris founded the company just following graduation from university, and I went on to do a Ph.D. I joined near the end of 2006, though I had always been on the sidelines before that. My name is John, John Knottenbelt, and I am the fourth director at Introversion Software – the first three being Chris, Mark and Tom who founded the company. Otherwise, if you enjoy a long read, go ahead, make my day.
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Also available to download the MP3 or OGG versions (right click, save as). It’s a really LONG read… if you prefer an streaming audio version, just hit the player. Little bit of a warning here, this is about 45 minutes of audio transcribed into text, with some minor changes for grammar and readability. Introversion Software has shipped three games in 6 years, an impressive feat for a company who hasn’t broken the magical 10 employee mark, while remaining an independent studio – being fully owned by the people who work there. For the better part of an hour he answers my questions about the game industry ignoring Linux as a gaming platform, postulating on ray tracing with 100 CPU cores, and proving he is indeed one of the last ‘bedroom programmers.’ John Knottenbelt is a Director with Introversion Software, currently leading development on the multiplayer game destined for a Linux or OS X computer near you: Multiwinia.