Feature

San Francisco's star studios on the Bay's big allure

Double Fine, Gaijin and Supergiant reveal all

San Francisco's star studios on the Bay's big allure

The sessions have been scheduled, meetings booked, interviews timetabled.

Yes, March is the time of the year when half the industry stands in a queue at scores of check-in desks around the globe impatiently waiting to head to San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference, better known as GDC.

It's nine months since we last touched down with the mobile development scene in the city by the Bay, but, with the industry's great and good preparing to touchdown at SFO next week, now seems like as good a time as any for a return tip.

In our third San Francisco sweep, we've tried to get a handle on just what life is like for developers in the city outside the annual industry circus that is GDC, and how it ties into the Bay Area's status as a startup sanctuary.

"As soon as I came here I thought 'man, there is something going on here'," details Greg Rice, producer at Double Fine Productions, in our exclusive interview coming tomorrow.

"It's totally different to anywhere else. It's so full of friendly people who aren't judgemental. It's also a city that wants to push things forward with technology and web companies."

Rice's employer is one of San Francisco's longest serving and best loved studios, headed by veteran Tim Schafer and behind the likes Psychonauts, Brutal Legend and most recently, Broken Age - one of the top funded Kickstarter projects of all time, and the game that sparked the crowdfunding fire.

"Everywhere you look there is a new startup with a crazy idea that might be the next Twitter. It's a really stimulating environment.

"In games there are indie studios springing up everywhere. It's great to be around people who are pushing the industry in lots of different ways. Right across the street is Gaijin Games. Supergiant is a few blocks away. There is a really vibrant indie community."

Good neighbours

Indeed, as Rice points out, Double Fine's near neighbour is Gaijin Games – a studio that, funnily enough, actually has much in common with Schafer's studio.

Gaijin tends to focus on specialist genres, but releases titles across multiple platforms in order to reach a varied audience. It's an outfit best known for the Bit. Trip series, which mixes rhythm based gameplay with an array of different genres, such as platformers to shmups.

More recently, the firm has made a move to launch smaller, more succinct releases, setting up a new internal studio – Robotube – to handle their development.

San Francisco's Moscone Center hosts GDC, WWDC and Google I/O

"Back when Gaijin was formed we developed the Bit. Trip series and those games were made within a few months, each one of those six," said studio head Jason Cirillo.

"We went on to do Bit. Trip Runner 2 which was in development for a couple of years. After that we wanted to get back to the roots of the company where we just come up with some fun ideas and just go for it and build the games quickly.

"The Robotube games are simpler. Maybe three or four months in development or maybe even shorter. Some of the games might just be a month or less depending on scope. We have two or three smaller games in development at the moment, with much bigger projects going on at Gaijin proper."

Superstars

In the final throws of the week, we'll also be catching up with Supergiant Games – and outfit may commentators wrongly label as an 'overnight success'.

Of course, Supergiant's first game Bastion launched back in 2011 and has since gone on to become one of the most talked about indie releases of recent years.

Like Gaijan, Supergiant's strategy was to push Bastion out across multiple platforms – from mobile and tablets to Google Chrome – and the outfit's rise also saw co-founder Amir Rao land a spot in Forbes Magazine's 30 Under 30.

"We go where game players are," details Rao. "We started on XBLA which was the home to a lot of games that inspired us, like Castle Crashers and Braid.

"Going from there onto PC was natural for us because we're long time PC gamers. Then we went to other places like Chrome, iOS, Mac and Linux. For us, we played games on all of those platforms so we wanted to release Bastion on all of them and find it a home there.

"We wanted to find out if there was a home for the game on those platforms which could inform subsequent decisions. Every decision we made to release Bastion on a new platform was made serially. It wasn't a grand plan to spend a year and a half working on this stuff!

"Every time we did something it made sense to try something else because new opportunities opened up."

Check back throughout the course of the week to see the full interviews sampled here in full, starting with Double Fine's Greg Rice tomorrow.

Joe just loves to go fast. That's both a reflection of his status as a self-proclaimed 'racing game expert', and the fact he spends his days frantically freelancing for a bevy of games sites. For PocketGamer.biz, however, Joe brings his insight from previous job as a community manager at iOS developer Kwalee. He also has a crippling addiction to Skittles, but the sugar gets him through the day.