Recently I had the opportunity to talk a little with Binary Tweed Managing Director Daniel Jones about the studio’s upcoming game release, Clover. If you haven’t heard, Clover will be the studio’s first foray onto the Xbox 360′s new Community Games service, which for the first time allows Independent Developers legal and authorized access not only to put their games onto a legitimate games console, but to sell them for a profit. For countless small teams without the resources to get on the radar of the big publishers, this is a veritable dream come true. For the Games Industry as a whole, this is an opportunity for hitherto undiscovered talent, both in skill and in gameplay concepts, to create a name for themselves.

In pursuit of that we’re pleased to speak with Mr. Jones and thank him for his time. Without further ado, Binary Tweed!

UBS: What factors drew your team to create a game for the new Xbox Live Community (XBLC) games service?

DJ: XBLC has dramatically lowered the barriers of entry to large-audience games development. The biggest draw of the service has to be the extremely large user base combined with a piracy-proof delivery mechanism.

UBS: Working with XNA, have you found the technology to be limiting in any way or has it allowed you to express the vision you wanted to? What would you say is the biggest strength of using XNA to create a game for XBLC? It’s biggest weakness?

DJ: So far XNA hasn’t limited us in any way, and there are some very impressive titles being developed using the technology. Being a C# library, it’s mostly object-oriented which brings with it the strengths and weaknesses of C# itself. I come from a Java background and by comparison C#’s documentation and APIs just aren’t as well thought-out and presented, but moving to an OO language helps move games development away from the ‘hacking’ mentality that C++ can lend itself to.

The biggest strength of XBLC development is probably not XNA itself (although being based on a high-level OO language enables this) but the community that Microsoft have been nurturing. For the most part there are some really friendly and helpful people on the Creator’s Club forums.

Coming from an enterprise Java background looking in on the games industry, it’s always seemed that games development has suffered from the closed nature of the business. There’s a great deal of information sharing present in the J2EE development community, and a lot of great open-source projects. Hopefully the Creator’s Club will start going some way to emulate this more collaborative approach.

UBS: From screens released for Clover it appears to be completely 2D, but of course a screenshot doesn’t always tell the whole story. Is there any use of 3D elements (ie, models) in the creation of Clover? If so, what sorts of challenges have you seen with implementing your artwork?

DJ: Clover is completely 2D. I do all of the programming, and whilst I’d like to think my object-oriented design skills are fairly good, my 3D maths isn’t all that hot. We needed to deliver a title that worked within our constraints, which is one of the reasons for choosing the genre that we did.

I’m also not sold on the idea that 3D is the answer to all the world’s woes. I personally thought that transition from 2D to 3D in the Saturn/PlayStation era was a dark period for gaming, with a lot of mediocre titles developed as a result of resources being spent getting to grips with then-new technology rather than focusing on creating a great experience.

UBS: What methods are the artists employing in the creation of the game’s Watercolor effects? Are pieces hand painted and scanned or are they created in software?

DJ: The artwork is first sketched in pencil as apart of the concepting process, and then a ‘final’ version is drawn on heavy paper. These are coloured in watercolour paint, outlined in pen, and then scanned in. We try to do as little digital manipulation as possible, but there’s some colour correction and tidying up that goes on in Adobe Photoshop.

To answer the previous question, one of the challenges has been maintaining consistency of colour when working in a physical medium. Additionally we also have two artists working on the project, so there’s a certain amount of stylistic consistency that also needs to be maintained.

UBS: What programming / art tools do you use? Does Binary Tweed make substantial use of any Open Source or Freeware tools or do you primarily use commercial software?

DJ: XNA ties you into using Visual Studio, so we don’t have much choice in IDE. Other than that, we try to use Open Source as much as possible if only to lower costs! I’m writing this in OpenOffice, and I use GIMP for our tiling system. I’ve always been a big fan of EditPlus, too.

One of the most painful parts of transitioning from J2EE to XNA development was having to move away from the open source Eclipse IDE. Whilst it has its fair share of bugs, it’s an incredibly powerful and versatile application, and Visual Studio comes nowhere near to matching it. I need some resourceful fellow to write an Eclipse plug-in to support XNA…

UBS: What are the big challenges of being an independent developer? What are some of the rewards?

DJ: The challenges are many. Funding, credibility and resourcing are the most prominent in my mind. So far Clover has been completely self-funded, and with XBLC sales figures still under wraps I dare say no-one in their right mind would have invested in such a project.

Funding also raises secondary problems that the majority of consumers aren’t going to consider when making their purchasing decision. Being based in central London, most of our costs are simply paying rent and bills, and so time really is money. As much as I’d like to have a team of 20 people working on Clover for a year to make it the masterpiece I know it could be, we have to make sure it gets into the marketplace and earning money within a certain time frame.

The rewards are much the same as any form of start-up business. I get to choose my own path, work only with people I choose to, and don’t have to put up with the herculean levels of corporate ineptitude I’ve experienced elsewhere. I’m very much looking forward to when we’ve brought a title to market, and can start looking at other opportunities and hopefully working with some great people.

UBS: What advice would you give to those would-be Indie Devs out there who don’t have a clear idea of where to start?

DJ: It’s a tough question. I’d say first and foremost that some degree of business experience is vital, so you can know how large companies work, how to communicate in a professional manner and how to negotiate deals and manage staff. Project management is also a key skill when you’re on a tight budget, so that should also be at the top of people’s lists.

A lot of people tend to focus on the technical first, and while this is obviously an important part of engineering any product, there’s little point spending months working on something only to have the project fail, or to market the product inadequately.

UBS: How do you see the Indie Games market today in light of the emerging Downloadable games market? Do you see space for Independent studios amidst the sea of big names?

DJ: I think there’s a great opportunity there for independent developers. As the video games market matures, we’ll see more refined taste from gamers who have been buying titles for over 20 years. There will always be a large number of people ready to snap up the latest blockbuster, but there’s going to be an ever-increasing number who are looking for something a little more niche.

I see the games industry starting to look a little more like the music industry. There are people who listen to chart tunes as they get ready to go out on a Saturday night, and there are people with very specific tastes who really appreciate the most technically-crafted works with a certain message.

UBS: Xbox Live’s Community Games service has made the console market accessible to Indie developers for the first time in an official capacity (sans hacking/modding/etc); would you like to see similar services from Nintendo and Sony?

DJ: Absolutely! There’s a reason why the United Kingdom was once one of the world’s hotbeds for developer talent, and that’s reason was the Sinclair Spectrum. One of the main strengths of XBLC is not necessarily what it’s doing, as Sony did something similar with PlayStation Net Yaroze a few years back, but the fact that it’s taking these titles to a very large audience. If Nintendo were to do something similar and open up Wii development, I’m sure there would be a lot of very excited people.

UBS: A common problem with Indie Developers is finding talented staff that is willing or able to work with little to no compensation while developing that critical first product. Have you had to contend with these issues, and if so, how have you managed to work around them?

DJ: I’m lucky to know some very talented people with a broad range of skills, so I’ve been able to call in a lot of favours. Many are keen to help just as they find the medium so interesting. Even my account manager at the bank was thrilled to be involved in a games development project!

UBS: If you find some reasonable success with your efforts on the XBLC, do you envision extending your reach to services such as PSN and WiiWare?

DJ: We’ve invested a lot of time and money into the artwork of Clover, and so it would make sense to  With the services mentioned we’d need a publisher on board, so a lot of our future possibilities depend on the performance of Clover. In an ideal world, there’d be a port to every platform where it made financial sense.

I’d like to thank Mr. Jones for taking the time out to talk with me about Binary Tweed and Clover, and on behalf of both myself and the Ugly Baby Studios team, I wish you all the best success and look forward to purchasing my copy of Clover on launch day!