Indie Developer Interview: Binary Tweed
by Jason Ward | February 13, 2009 in Gaming, Indie Games | Comments Off
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.
