Speaking in an
in-depth new interview with Gamasutra, Wideload Games founder Alex Seropian has been discussing the company's strategy, revealing XBLA plans, outsourcing practicalities, and his experiences with Epic's Unreal Engine 3.
As Gamasutra
originally confirmed when the interview was conducted at E3, Seropian confirmed: "We have 20 people now - we actually have two teams. We have a team that's doing ['political party game']
Hail to the Chimp, which is the
Stubbs The Zombie team with a couple of more people on it, and then we have a real small team that's doing games for digital download." When pressed for more details, Seropian admitted that "we have a game right now that is destined for Live Arcade."
In addition, when discussing Wideload's outsourcing tactics, much-discussed in
the Stubbs Game Developer postmortem published last year, Seropian revealed: "We build a prototype with our internal team, which is at least the first of every asset, and then we spend a lot of time doing preproduction with that internal team for the rest of the project. Then we send a lot of stuff out from that point. With
Hail to the Chimp, we've been outsourcing some of the code. We did very little of that with
Stubbs."
Finally, it was confirmed that the firm is using Epic's Unreal Engine 3 to make
Hail To The Chimp, and Seropian commented of his impressions thus far: "It's a great toolset, it's a great engine, and you have to be a little careful about what you want to do with it. We're doing something very non-standard with it. I don't know if anyone else is making a party game, but [it won't be with] the very stylized graphics we have. That's a challenge for us, because Unreal was designed to make
Gears of War. Some of it's been a challenge, but some of it's been great. The whole tool chain aspect of it has been really good for us."
The
full Gamasutra interview with Seropian is now available for reading, including lots more information on outsourcing tips, the political nature of
Hail To The Chimp, and much more.
