Interview

Mobile devs need to scale for '30 second bursts' of play, says Lady Shotgun

Design director Marsh on targeting toilet time

Mobile devs need to scale for '30 second bursts' of play, says Lady Shotgun
There's one thing every console developer making a move on mobile needs to master in order to survive: the ability to change.

It's a positive sign, then, that Lady Shotgun Games - founded by former Tomb Raider designer and producer Anna Marsh and Sarah van Rompaey - is fully embracing the mobile industry's quirks, relishing the challenge adapting to new practices represents.

The studio says learning to tailor its games for short bursts of play is a particular test, but the insight those at Lady Shotgun have amassed working for big publishers means it boasts skills many other developers don't, such as a handle on the important of pre-production.

We caught up with design director Marsh for her take on why Lady Shotgun's experience should stand it in good stead for life on smartphones.

Pocket Gamer: How did Lady Shotgun get started?

Anna Marsh: During our time at Eidos we'd get sent out to visit developers in all kinds of far flung places and quite often end up putting the game dev world to rights over a few drinks at the end of the day.

We had this idea of being a 'different kind of developer' and working in ways that would fix many of the annoying issues we encountered daily, but it wasn't until we were both working freelance that we came back to the idea.

I'd been writing up game concepts whenever I wasn't working for clients, and one concept was a real stand out - everyone who saw it just got it immediately.

In the meantime I'd met our lead artist Gabriela Pavan, who was also working freelance as a graphic and web designer, and Sarah [van Rompaey, executive producer] was an old friend of Katharine Neil who was making independent games.

We kind of had this 'it's now or never' moment and took the plunge. We asked other developers - whose skills we rated highly and had enjoyed working with freelance before - to round out the team. Luckily they said yes, and Lady Shotgun came into being.

You describe yourself as a 'co-operative of freelance developers'. How does that work in practice?

We're essentially all still independent freelancers who are shareholders in a company that administers the finance of the game. UK company law is pretty flexible, you can easily be a director and shareholder of multiple companies, so we're using that to our advantage.

We've been lucky enough to find a great lawyer and accountant to advise us on the technicalities of doing things this way and make sure it's all done above board.

It suits us on many levels - we can't work long office hours because we have childcare arrangements to work around, and we don't have a lot of cash, so this way we avoid having a physical office and the overheads of recruiting a team.

At the same time the team all benefit directly from any profits made, which matches our beliefs about ethical working – we feel very strongly that management and financiers shouldn't stand to make many times more money from a product than the people who actually created it.

We've also seen how the standard way of doing things can curtail quality, innovation and creativity. From trying to squeeze too many features into tight schedules to avoiding games or features that are 'risky', conventional development methods can often work against the potential of a game.

I love that we seem to have inadvertently tapped into this zeitgeist questioning the traditional methods of doing things, with big well-known names turning to Kickstarter to realise their visions, and many industry veterans leaving established studios to become independent.

We're pretty confident that the quality of our finished game will prove that the accepted system of running a game company isn't the only way of doing it.

What smartphone platforms are you focusing on?

We're starting on iOS, and aiming to port to Android, Windows and other platforms after the iOS version is launched.

iOS is the platform our code team have the most experience of so we decided to do it this way to get our first game under our belts in a realistic time frame. It doesn't mean we're not interested in other platforms though, we'll absolutely be treating that as our priority after the iOS version is complete.


Artwork from Lady Shotgun's first as-of-yet unnamed release

How have you found working on smartphone platforms compared to others you've worked on?

It's been very interesting to move onto mobile platforms after spending so long working on the console, but it's not the first time I've made such a platform switch.

Before I got my first industry job at Psygnosis I was making Doom and Quake conversions on PC. It's fascinating as a game designer to work on all these platforms because you really sieve out the universal fundamentals of game design.

How to make impacts feel impactful, how to make the player feel rewarded for successes or let them know they've made a mistake, how to take an area of your game and drill down into it to create just the right amount of depth without adding unnecessary complication – these things are pretty much transferable to any game and platform.

One thing that changes is the amount of time a player might play for in one go. On console you could reasonably expect a player to put in at least 30 minutes, whereas on mobile it might be only 30 seconds between bus stops or on the toilet - I find toilet gamers very interesting, if it's not too weird to say that!

It's the evolution of reading the paper on the loo. I don't do it myself, I have to say.

The pacing, and the way that you save the player's progress, needs to be scaled to that 30 second burst.

Another difference is obviously controls. I get a bee in my bonnet about making a control layout feel comfortable and natural to a player - I've argued over whether a particular action should go here or there on a joypad for days! So the touchscreen - it was important to me that we do something that utilises that.

I love the fact that it lets the player be really in touch with the elements of the game. Players don't have to go through the medium of a controller but can actually touch whatever game object they're interacting with. It's very immediate, organic – sensual almost you might say.

Perhaps some of the biggest lessons we've taken from our time in console is the importance of pre-production. So many games don't allow the designers the time to work through the game design properly and make sure the i's are dotted and the t's crossed - teams are rushed into production to get something playable on screen.

The things we've learned about how to approach pre-production and how to make the materials produced useful for a team, that's been invaluable.

Some still perceive there to be a reluctance for big, traditionally console focused publishers to embrace smartphones and tablets. Do you think there's any truth in that?

We have had the impression that some big publishers struggle to move at the speed of mobile dev.

Their processes are based on traditional console and PC games that take years and millions of pounds to develop so understandably have many approval gates to get through.

Often they want to see something playable before they'll even consider a game.

But on mobile, by the time you have something playable you can be only weeks away from finishing the game, and, since it's so simple to self-publish and distribute through the App Store and similar portals, at that point developers really have to weigh up the benefits a publisher could bring against the obvious pro of keeping all the money made for the themselves.

I guess ultimately the publishers will adapt, the potential return on investment on mobile is just too high for them to ignore.
Thanks to Anna for her time.

You can find out more about Lady Shotgun on the studio's website.

With a fine eye for detail, Keith Andrew is fuelled by strong coffee, Kylie Minogue and the shapely curve of a san serif font.